Gothic Tales

by Arthur Conan Doyle, Darryl Jones (Editor)

Overview

Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced. Throughout a long writing career, he drew on his own medical background, his travels, and his increasing interest in spiritualism and the occult to produce a spectacular array of gothic tales. Many of Doyle's writings are recognized as the very greatest tales of terror. They range from hauntings in the polar wasteland to evil surgeons and malevolent jungle landscapes.

This collection brings together over thirty of Conan Doyle's best gothic tales. Darryl Jones's introduction discusses the contradictions in Conan Doyle's very public life - as a medical doctor who became obsessed with the spirit world, or a British imperialist drawn to support Irish Home Rule - and shows the ways in which these found articulation in that most anxious of all literary forms, the Gothic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191053634
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	10/20/2016
Series:	Oxford World's Classics Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	576
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Darryl Jones is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, where he has taught since 1994. He has held Visiting Professorships at Dartmouth College, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, and Tongji University, Shanghai. He is the author or editor of over 10 books, including most recently the Oxford editions of the Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James and Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, as well as many articles on nineteenth-century and popular literature.

Date of Birth:

May 22, 1859

Date of Death:

July 7, 1930

Place of Birth:

Edinburgh, Scotland

Place of Death:

Crowborough, Sussex, England

Education:

Edinburgh University, B.M., 1881; M.D., 1885

Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
Chronology
The American's Tale
The Captain of the 'PoleStar'
The Winning Shot
J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement
John Barrington Cowles
Uncle Jeremy's Household
The Ring of Thoth
The Surgeon of Gaster Fell
A Pastoral Horror
'De Profundis'
Lot No. 249
The Los Amigos Fiasco
The Case of Lady Sannox
The Lord of Chateau Noir
The Third Generation
The Striped Chest
The Fiend of the Cooperage
The Beetle-Hunter
The Sealed Room
The Brazilian Cat
The New Catacomb
The Retirement of Signor Lambert
The Brown Hand
Playing with Fire
The Leather Funnel
The Pot of Caviare
The Silver Mirror
The Terror of Blue John Gap
Through the Veil
How it Happened
The Horror of the Heights
The Bully of Brocas Court
The Nightmare Room
The Lift
Explanatory Notes

Editorial Reviews

"Collected in a scholarly edition for the first time, these are 33 of Conan Doyle's finest Gothic short stories...Even if you have already read the tales in other volumes, it is worth buying this book for Jones's introduction alone: it explores the tensions and contrasts that defined the author's life, and how he articulated these themes in his work, offering the latest in literary criticism and historical research." - The Lady

"This collection demonstrates still that Conan Doyle is still a master writer and...throws an interesting light on the career that wasn't Sherlock Holmes." - Nick Blackshaw, Starburst Magazine

"Shows there was more to Conan Doyle than Moriarty, Dr Watson and The Hound of the Baskervilles." - Keith Richmond, ASLEF Journal

From the Publisher

Irish-born narrator Gary Furlong creates an understated and easy tone for this bounty of 30 horror and supernatural tales by one of the world’s most beloved authors. Mummies, ancient rites, forgotten ghosts, spurned promises, lost treasures, and haunted ships abound in these “Twilight Zone”-like chronicles, which first appeared in a number of the most popular British magazines of 125 years ago. Furlong’s youthful vocal presence dovetails nicely with preponderance of young English gentlemen who populate these stories, often set in the far reaches of the British Empire. Although Doyle dabbled in spiritualism and politics, he was foremost an entertainer. Think of the creator of Sherlock Holmes as the great-great-grandfather of pulp fiction and binge-worthy television, and it all makes sense. B.P. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile