In this study of Gothic texts from the 1790s to the 1990s, Cyndy Hendershot explores the genre's characterization and representation of masculinity, comparing and contrasting the content and characters found in various familiar texts. As Hendershot demonstrates, the Gothic is more a mode than a rigid historical period; it is an "invasive" tendency that reveals the imaginative limits of social realities and literary techniques far beyond its origins in late-eighteenth-century Britain.

And as the author clearly shows in this first scholarly treatment of its kind, one continuing obsession of the Gothic mode is masculinity. Masculinity is in some sense a Gothic castle of the imagination, haunted by fears of the body, science, and angry colonial subjects.

Perhaps most important, The Animal Within seeks to expand the definition of the Gothic from a limited periodization in the late eighteenth century to a mode that appears in other literary genres, bringing with it he ability to expose the workings of ideological reality.