This book brings together fourteen of the most ambitious and thought-provoking recent essays by David Punter, who has been writing on the Gothic for over thirty years. Punter addresses developments in Gothic writing and Gothic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century, by isolating and discussing specific themes and scenarios that have remained relevant to literary and philosophical discussion and by paying close attention to the motifs, figures, and recurrences that loom large in twenty-first-century engagements with the Gothic. Demonstrating an astounding breadth of erudition by a scholar at the top of his field, The Gothic Condition both engages deeply with Gothic history and examines our continuing fascination with Gothic tropes—the vampire, the zombie, the phantom, and the living dead.