SAGE, Victor. The Gothic Novel. Basing stroke:
Macmillan, 1990
Literary history has tended to
marginalize 18th-century Gothic as a minor product of Romanticism. Such
attitude pigeonholed the Gothic as part of an excessive reaction against the
dominance of Augustan rationalism by an age that had grown weary of Enlighten
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 18th
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 Rev.
·
Sade’s “Ideé
sur les 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/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, ‘Magical-political’ victim of Magical disillusions and
Marquis Grosses 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. Radcliffe
rationalism (explained supernatural)
- ·
Blackwood magazine
flourished between 1820-50 special sing in ghost stories and bizarre tales/new
Mothy 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)
