SAGE, Victor. The Gothic Novel. Basing stroke: Macmillan, 1990.

SAGE, Victor. The Gothic Novel. Basing stroke: Macmillan, 1990.

            Literary history has tended to marginalize 18^th century Gothic as a minor product of Romanticism. Such attitude pigeon-holed the Gothic as part of an excessive reaction against the dominance of Augustan rationalism by an age that had grown weary of Enlightenment values. These early novels of terror, so the account ran, with their gothic Machinery and conventions are nothing more than a were curiosity for a modern  reader.

            But the actual history of critical opinion is more diverse and interesting than such literary-historical judgment. The genre is not a dusty corner but an arena open to the social and political interests of the day. Both Literary form and the commentary on it are permeated by controversy, explaining something about the value of this writing during a period of fast social change and political transition.

→ Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto (1764)

·         Critical reception (unfavorable) X public reception (successful).

·         Mineral Press (William Lane), booksellers, circulating libraries.

·         Expansion of readership, futility of the novel, critical debate.

Proscribed by the canoes of good taste and morality, manufactured and consumed in large doses by women and sometimes by critics, the Gothic novel expanded like an open Secret in the last decades of the 18^th century. Locked in our modern view, the genre looks all too unified, but the fiction market of the 1970s was polarized by a range of contradictory social and political factors. (Methodism, female emancipation, political radicalism, anti-Catholicism, etc.).

·      The Pursuits of Literature (satirist?) tendencies followed the Revolution.

·      Sade’s “Ideé surles Romans” revolutionary up heaves. In: Crimes d’Amour.

Nothing illustrates this process more aptly than the reception in 1796 of one of the central Gothick texts, The Monk. The rhetoric of this novel, like Udolpho and Melmoth, uses the anti-Catholicism prejudice of the audience as a tactic to gain acceptance.

·      These writes (Walpole, Beckford, Lewis) form a tradition of Whig dilettantism which one might broadly speak as a form of cultural dissent. The dissent was more theatrical than political.

·      Charlotte Smith “democratic” views.

The development of the Gothic Villain, that gigantic sinister figure, needs to be seen in this context of political suspicion, because the archetype partially derives from the English translations during the period 1794/96 of Schiller’s  the ghost-seer, Schink’s ‘Magical-political’ victim of Magical disillusions and Marquis Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries.

            J.M.S Tompkins Gothic was… “a struggle to possess and appropriate the language of cultural division”. (SAGE, p.16)

·         Burke + Gothic architecture (Burke, p.)

·         Mrs. Raddiffe rationalism (explained supernatural)

·         Blackwood Magazine flourished between 1820-50 specializing in ghost stories and bizarre tales/new Monthy Magazine.

·         Elenor Sickels (The Gloomy Egoist) based on the assumption that theological doctrine plays a conditioning or determining role in the obsessively repeated motifs of the Gothick romance.

·         Mario Praz (The Romantic Agony).