The Gothic is a highly adapted and adaptive genre/mode. Like the practice of adaptation, the gothic is often dismissed as a formulaic and derivative form. The books listed below are major studies of the gothic, its generic conventions, history, and evolution.
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (1979)
- J. Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995)
- Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (2007)
- Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820 (2010)
- Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995)