Criticism of the Gothic novel has been abundant, yet such works tend to view the Gothic novel within the constraints of the genre rather than investigate its wider influence in the nineteenth century. “Gothic Archives” will follow this influence, arguing that the Gothic novel indicates a change in attitude towards reading, and particularly towards reading history, in the nineteenth century. Gothic novels such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and the meta-Gothic of The Antiquary (1816) assume that authentic historical experience is difficult, if not impossible, to represent accurately, emphasizing in their plots the misunderstandings that arise from attempts to read and write the historical experience. It follows that the Gothic novel typically stages reading scenes that delve into (often fictional) archival sources. Thus Gothic novels always place authentic historical knowledge within the archive, requiring characters to excavate obscure source material such as letters, books, portraits, wills, and the like to discover what the Gothic interprets as historical truth. In this way, the Gothic novel offers a historically oriented epistemology of reading, grounded in the affective possibilities of historical writing, that challenges considerations of truth and accuracy that inform traditional historiography. By investigating the emotional resonances of historical narratives, the Gothic novel questions how we as readers might arrive at a particular version of history. If the Gothic novel identifies the archive as the authentic historical representation, however, the act of interpreting the archive is almost never fully realized; Interpretation in the Gothic novel is always a partial, interrupted, obscure process. This trend indicates… midway through the paper… that we begin to situate the work we critics do in relation to the imaginative stories that inform our critical readings. "Gothic Archives" involves some important bodies of critical writings that take as their object the theoretical possibilities of the Gothic novel. He is indebted to the work of Robert Miles, who goes beyond simply enumerating Gothic conventions and instead formulates a theory of Gothic epistemology. He is also indebted to the work of Eve Sedgwick, who links Gothic epistemologies – what she calls paranoid reading positions – to the practice of literary criticism. “Gothic Archives” enriches this work with a theory of how archives function in the Gothic novel, integrating the theories of Gothic epistemology mentioned above with an account of the role of the archive in the Gothic as both a literal and symbolic repository of feelings and cultures cultural. hits.