The most exhaustive and complete anthology of gothic tales
Although ghost stories are as old as humanity, the emergence of spectral narratives came from Romanticism, which later transmitted interest in the spooky to the Victorian period. The unstoppable advance of the alienating and dehumanizing industrialization, the spread of materialist philosophical doctrines that proclaimed the primacy of the social and rational over the spiritual, and the gradual crisis of religion and the creationist model, led to a turn towards the sphere of the Gothic. and the fantastic, taking shape from a literary perspective in supernatural and phantasmagorical narratives, in which the ghost no longer appears to instruct morally, but to spread a sense of terror and uneasiness in the reader and in the collective unconscious.

This work is an anthology ‒the most exhaustive and complete to date‒ of Victorian and Edwardian stories, the golden age of the genre, whose authors were seduced by ghost stories and by the enigma of the existence. With ruined castles, desolate cemeteries and dark forests as a backdrop, these stories seek to recreate in readers that ancestral fear of the unknown and the surprise contained in the foreboding of the inevitable.

Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. Annotated edition features:

Twenty-three stories from the Victorian and Edwardian era whose authors were the greatest exponents of literature or the horror genre, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Amelia Edwards, Charles Dickens, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker or H. G. Wells, among others.
An introduction that reveals the essential details related to the time, the authors, the characters and the constants, as well as the plot pillars, the symbols and the background that underlies each of the stories.
Notes to the text that clarify literary, historical, artistic and cultural terms or references.
A complete bibliography, useful both for those who want to delve into the Victorian and Edwardian periods in general and the authors in particular.
With more than 200 illustrations to the text.