Ghosts and Robbers

At the start of the nineteenth century, German "Schauerliteratur" was so popular as to permanently associate that land with the Gothic and the ghostly. Translations of short pieces published in journals like The German Museum and Blackwood's Magazine started a vogue for this new kind of fiction amongst the English reading public. The present anthology, the first of its kind in a decade, collects together examples of these tales from many of the great masters of the genre, including Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué, Johann Karl August Musäus, Louisa Drachmann, and Heinrich Clauren. Featuring bandits, cursed knights, tragic spectres, witch cults, diabolical bargains and the thirsting dead, the pieces in this volume mark the point at which the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century met the psychological intensity of Romanticism in the birth of the modern horror story.