JONES,
Darryl. Horror: A thematic History in
Fiction and Film. London, Arnold, 2002.
Introduction:
Ban this sick filth!
The
controversy about too nasty narratives: “going back, as we shall see, at least
as far as the publication of Mathew Lewis`s The
Monk in 1976. Reviewing that novel the year after the publication, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge believes it to be ‘a romance, which if a parent saw in the
hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale’ (1797: Review of the Monk, The Critical Review,
XIX, February, p. 194-200). Somewhere around this time Jame Austen was
beginning to write Northanger Abbey, a novel submitted (but not accepted) for
publication in 1803, revised for publication shortly before her death in 1817.
And finally published posthumously, with persuasion in 1818. In her
“Advertisement by the Authoress” to the revised edition, Austen wrote ‘The
public are entreated to bear in mind that 13 years have passed since it was
finished, many more since it was begun, and during that period, places,
manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes’ (1972, ed.
Anne Ehrenpreis. Harmonds worth: Penguin). That is to say, by the time it was
published in 1818, Northanger Abbey,
set around 1798, was already an historical novel, beneath whose surface
was detectable the upheavals of that very turbulent decade, the 1790’s, when
England was at war with France, living under the fear of French Invasion, with
blown political uprising in Ireland (Gothic novel is a product of this
instability). Catherine and Isabella: Are you sure they are all horrid? (Austen
1972: 61). Austen provides a list of genuine Gothic novels published in the
1790’s [ See Sadleir]
Michael Sadleir 1927: The Northanger Novels, English Association Pamphlets, nº 68.
