"Andrew Smith reconsiders the relationship between the nineteenth-century Gothic, theories of the sublime and Freudian psychoanalysis, showing how the Gothic of the period produces a radical critique of these ideas as it forms its own version of sublimity and the unconscious. At issue here is an identification of a specific Gothic history, one which rewrites the dominant intellectual history of the time.

The argument is made that the Gothic critically reads Freudian ideas avant la lettre and so requires us to move beyond psychoanalysis to develop an enquiry into the history of ideas.".

"By applying contemporary critical theory, this study historicises psychoanalysis through a new and significant theorisation of the Gothic. A range of writers including Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker are explored in order to illustrate how the Gothic rewrites both an idealist philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis."--BOOK JACKET.