Emphasizing the interdisciplinary range of this recurring motif, Ellen Brinks traces "distressed masculinity" in canonical instances of gothic imagination - Byron's Oriental Tales and Coleridge's Christabel - but also in works such as Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Keats's Hyperion fragments, and Freud's letters and scientific writings.

Ellen Brinks is an assistant professor of English at Colorado State University, where she teaches courses in British Romanticism, literary theory, and gothic literature and film. Her publications, which explore the cultural contexts of gender and sexuality and tensions between individual and social expresssions between individual and social expressions of identity, include essays on women and cartography, the intersection of economics and sexuality in contemporary film, and the politics and poetics of home in the works of twentieth-century lesbian writers.