A Critical Edition of Thomas Tod Stoddart's 'The Death-Wake' or 'Lunacy'

Auteur

Michael J. Abolafia is a biographer, editor and archivist based in New Jersey. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement. He graduated from Columbia University in 2017 with a BA in English.

Texte du rabat

Thomas Tod Stoddart's innovative gothic epic poem The Death-Wake (1831), now little known, may have been lost to history if not for the interventions of Edgar Allan Poe in 1842 and Andrew Lang in 1895. This critical edition reprints and contextualises Stoddart's morbid and distinctive masterpiece, bringing to light an important but overlooked expression of the Scottish Gothic with transatlantic cultural implications.