About Us

Gothic Keats Press publishes books of fine literature, including full-length collections of poetry, works of fiction, literary nonfiction, and academic essays.  Our literary interests concern the immortal lives and writings of such illustrious dead as our beloved John Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, the Brontës, Lord Byron, Dr. John William Polidori, Mary Robinson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and many, many more.  Although we have been seduced irrevocably by the dark side of Romanticism, possessing a particular penchant for that brooding, melancholy aesthetic of Gothic literature, tinctured deliciously with macabre mystery, decay, terror, the supernatural sublime, and death, we at Gothic Keats Press enjoy a myriad of literary genres and styles.

Our desire is to publish books of the highest quality, in both hardcover and electronic formats, containing the sort of poems and stories that we obsess over, that galvanizes our imagination with visionary imagery, haunting us with phantasmal scenes that stay with us long after reading, never letting us go, until, like a hallucinatory madness, it consumes us.  A bit overly romantic, perhaps, but we are who we are, and besides, literature is all we live for.  To put it less prolixly, our aim is to publish books that we wish to read and re-read time and time again, from the poets and writers of both yesterday and today, and illustrated by contemporary artists when we can.

We are also of the scholarly bent, and not only do we keep alive the memory of our beloved dead by reading and re-reading their brilliant words, we regularly read biographies and the latest academic research about them as well.  In addition to dedicating a section of our website solely to academic essays, we plan on publishing an annual academic journal, Gothic Keats Review, in both print and electronic formats.  The journal will feature scholarly research from both academics and independent researchers alike, reviews of contemporary writing and film, pieces on upcoming and previous literary exhibitions (Frankenstein, créé des ténèbres (2016) and Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (2018) were particular favourites of ours), travel narrative and memoir (think Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark), illustrations from artists whom we admire, and more.

And while we do indeed fancy topics and ideas that lean darkly toward the Gothic, our literary interests are many, and we thus welcome and want essays concerning a diverse range of subjects and authors, from the obsessive matchmaking in Jane Austen to the vampiric companionship in Anne Rice, from the seemingly tea-induced madness in Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” to the supernatural decadence in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, from the Gothic fairytales of Angela Carter to the Southern Gothic of Toni Morrison, from the Shelleyan influence in works such as Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers” and Elinor Wylie’s Mr. Hodge & Mr. Hazard to the more incendiary works and actions inspired by Shelley’s radical and revolutionary ideas, and from Keats’s brilliant love letters to his beloved Fanny Brawne to the letters between two Victorian poets within A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession.

Lastly, we understand that there are many ways one can define the “Gothic” in literature, and sometimes the concept of what makes a poem or story particularly “Gothic” can be rather bewildering, if not misinterpreted.  However, for us and other such literary eccentrics, there are distinct experiences, often uncanny, and certain recurrent themes and tropes that are indeed unmistakable.  Instead of attempting to write our own concise definition which, given our editor-in-chief’s incurable obsession for all things Gothic and Romantic, would undoubtedly end up as some sort of labyrinthian disquisition of obscure quotes and even obscurer references, we feel it appropriate to include a short paragraph from our own copy of The Romantic Period, Vol. D of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2012), edited by Deidre Shauna Lynch and the late Jack Stillinger (1931–2020) whose edition of Keats’s poetry was our very first.

“Strictly speaking, the Gothic is not ‘Gothic’ at all, but a phenomenon that originates in the late eighteenth century, long after enlightened Europeans put the era of Gothic cathedrals, chivalry, and superstition behind them—a phenomenon that begins, in fact, as an embrace of a kind of counterfeit medievalism or as a ‘medieval revival.’ As a word they applied to a dark and distant past, Gothic gave Romantic-period writers and readers a way to describe accounts of terrifying experiences in ancient castles and ruined abbeys—experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, ghosts, and graveyards. In the long run Gothic became a label for the macabre, mysterious, supernatural, and terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature generally…”