Domestic Gothic Writing after Horace Walpole and before Ann Radcliffe

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-242
Author(s):  
Deborah Russell
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Sean Moreland

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.


Author(s):  
Fiona Price

Chapter One explores how the historical novel emerged in the 1760s as a form which at once employed and interrogated the dominant political narrative of ‘ancient liberties’. The notion of ancient constitutionalism allowed proposals for reform or for limits on monarchical power to be seen as attempts to ensure stability or, at most, (as with the theory of the Norman Yoke) to return to political origin. Yet for Horace Walpole ancient constitutionalism seems at times a troubled jest; Clara Reeve senses that the motif desperately needs reinforcement; and even after the more radical uses of the theory of the Norman Yoke by the Constitutional Society in the 1780s and 90s, Ann Radcliffe considers it a frozen political fable. Haunted by the spectre of the divine right of kings, in the historical novel the narrative of tradition ultimately proves an insufficient underpinning for the constitution.


Author(s):  
James Uden

Gothic literature imagines the return of ghosts from the past. What about the classical past? Spectres of Antiquity is the first full-length study describing the relationship between Greek and Roman culture and the Gothic novels, poetry, and drama of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. Rather than simply representing the opposite of classical aesthetics and ideas, the Gothic emerged from an awareness of the lingering power of antiquity, and it irreverently fractures and deconstructs classical images and ideas. The Gothic also reflects a new vision of the ancient world: no longer inspiring modernity through its examples, antiquity has become a ghost, haunting and oppressing contemporary minds rather than guiding them. Through readings of canonical works by authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Mary Shelley, Spectres of Antiquity argues that these authors’ ghostly plots and ideas preserve the remembered traces of Greece and Rome. In comprehensive detail, Spectres of Antiquity rewrites the history of the Gothic, demonstrating that the genre was haunted by a far deeper sense of history than readers had previously assumed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 304
Author(s):  
Pedro Telles da Silveira

<p><strong>Resumo</strong>: O objetivo deste artigo é compreender a relação entre a prática antiquária e o romance gótico na Inglaterra do século XVIII. Procura-se demonstrar como a prática antiquária serve de enquadramento ficcional para uma expansão do conceito de verossímil. Por meio do conjunto de procedimentos metodológicos do antiquário e de sua aproximação com a prática jurídica da época, elementos fantásticos que seriam inverossímeis passam a ser aceitos na trama do romance gótico. Estes elementos, por fim, abrem espaço para a experiência do sublime, de modo que o uso de procedimentos de prova e a escrita ficcional estavam intimamente ligados.  </p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Antiquariato; Romance gótico; sublime. </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong>: This paper seeks to study the interrelation between antiquarian practices and the gothic novel in eighteenth-century England. It tries to show how antiquarianism provides a fictional framing for an expansion of the concept of verisimilitude. Because of the methodological procedures developed by the antiquarian and their rapprochement with the judicial practices of its time, fantastical elements that would be otherwise discarded as implausible are accepted in the gothic novel. Therefore those elements create the possibility of experiencing the sublime, so the procedures regarding the ascertainment of truth and proof of historical discourse are intimately entangled with fictional writing. </p><p><strong>Kewyords</strong>: Antiquarianism; Gothic novel; sublime.</p>


2017 ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Duncan Petrie

The Gothic has long been acknowledged as a significant cultural influence within Britain’s cinematic heritage. Locating the roots of the British contribution to cinematic horror in the familiar literary terrain of classic Gothic fiction initiated in the late eighteenth century by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis, Pirie makes a persuasive case for the value of the genre and its centrality to the cultural specificity of a (then critically undervalued) ‘national’ cinema. But what is immediately striking from a contemporary, post-devolutionary vantage point is the Anglocentrism of the analysis as conveyed by the interchangeable use of the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ throughout his book. Moreover, while acknowledging that ‘the role of Ireland in Gothic literature is immense’ (1973: 96), Pirie proceeds to co-opt C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) – for him a foundational text alongside Lewis’s The Monk (1796) – to a singularly English literary tradition.


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