POTTER, Franz. Twilight of a Genre: Art and Trade in
Gothic
Fiction, 1814 – 1834. Phd. University of East Anglia,
2002.
This
thesis sets out to challenge certain assumptions of the canon making process of
the Gottic genre. The modern critical view point of the Gothic limits it to a
set of high reading achievements: Castle
of Otranto, The Italian, Melmoth, are constantly cited as
defining the genre. However, this canon excludes the question of whether those novels
produced as part of a lucrative “trade” can be admitted, either as a
legitimate, literally category of even as a contribution to the genre. These is
a clear conflict between art and trade Gothic the first being an indicator of
the genre’s critical reception, the other dismissed as not really belonging to
the ‘genre’ by an act of assessment which assimilates the popular to the
literally and finds it “disreputable”.
CHAPTER 1
Empirical statistical analysis of the “trade” (circulating libraries) Varma
argues that after Melmoth (1820) the
Gothic splintered into several diverse channels including serials, tales,
fragments and bluebooks. (p. 176, 186) a more recent account in Sage’s Gothic Novel (p.84).
“Cheaply printed, bluebooks were often, but not
invariable, 36 or 72 page redactions or abridgments of full-length Gothic
novels illustrated with crude woodcuts” (p.17, Potter) [ W. Fish circulating
library at Norwich 1817]
CHAPTER 2
Two biographical case studies which illustrate the mechanism of trade (Sarah
Wilkinson + Francis Lathom) both exemplified the ability to diversify their
craft creating a range of works that reflect the readers shifting interest in
the genre.
è Robert
Mayo raised the debate of art X trade isolates gothic in
magazines (1942) The Gothic short story in magazines: the moralizing rhetoric.
è Appendices
complete catalogues of two Norwich circulating libraries (Booths and Fish’s) a
large sample (almost 1.000 texts) of Gothic novels, bluebooks, gothic magazines
between 1800 – 1834.
