The Romance of the Forest

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Radcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho

The Romance of the Forest (1791) heralded an enormous surge in the popularity of Gothic novels, in a decade that included Ann Radcliffe’s later works, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Set in Roman Catholic Europe of violent passions and extreme oppression, the novel follows the fate of its heroine Adeline, who is mysteriously placed under the protection of a family fleeing Paris for debt. They take refuge in a ruined abbey in south-eastern France, where sinister relics of the past - a skeleton, a manuscript, and a rusty dagger - are discovered in concealed rooms. Adeline finds herself at the mercy of the abbey’s proprietor, a libidinous Marquis whose attentions finally force her to contemplate escape to distant regions. Rich in allusions to aesthetic theory and to travel literature, The Romance of the Forest is also concerned with current philosophical debate and examines systems of thought central to the intellectual life of late eighteenth-century Europe.

scholarly journals A Bakhtinian Approach to the Study of Eighteenth-Century English Gothic Novels

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. p42
Author(s):  
Shuping Chen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Space Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Space Coordinate ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho ◽  
First Time

M. M. Bakhtin in the third essay of The Dialogic Imagination coined the term “chronotope” to denote the interaction and integration of time and space in novelistic narratives. Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope emphasizes that time and space coordinate with each other rather than insist on their individualities in narratives. The major chronotope of the novel usually determines its generic characteristics. The current study attempts to utilize Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to anatomize the time-space structure of major Gothic novels in the eighteenth century, namely, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for the purpose of detecting and summarizing the common features of the Gothic genre. Manifold approaches and theories had been applied in this area, but it is the first time that Bakhtin’s chronotope was employed in the stylistic study of eighteenth-century Gothic novels written by Walpole and Radcliffe.

Jane Austen’s Questioning of Gender and Genres

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Opposite View

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.

History on the Move: Reimagining Historical Change and the (Im)possibility of Utopia in the 21st Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhan Hellerma
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Current Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Main Ideas

Abstract In his meticulously researched and conceptually innovative book, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon aims to capture the historical sensibility emergent during the postwar period broadly conceived, spanning from the 1940s to our present moment. Attending particularly to the debates concerning ecological and technological outlooks, Simon theorizes that our historical horizon is increasingly shaped by the expectations of an unprecedented event that challenges the sustainability of the human subject as known today. Arguing that the concept of unprecedented change can best be explained against the backdrop of a modern processual temporal configuration originating in the eighteenth century, Simon likewise probes the same concept to illuminate a distinct relationship with the past. Elaborating on the main ideas of the book, the paper will interrogate critically Simon’s assertion whereby the novel postwar temporality is inherently dystopian, and will negotiate Simon’s engagement with presentism, which he questions as an inaccurate representation of our current regime of historicity.

Generating Captain Cook and Paul Kane into Published Authors: Case Studies of a Book History Model for Exploration and Travel Writing (pp 7-56)

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian MacLaren
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

As more and more research occurs into published English-language travel literature, the production of individual texts, rather than their authorship alone, demands attention. Both the unreliability of the text as entirely the traveller's or explorer's own and the question of whether or not the text narrates only his own experience and observations have made problematical the matter of interpretation. Recently, Percy G. Adams has shown in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (1983) how, because travel writing issued often enough from writers who did no more than move around in an armchair, this genre and the novel grew indistinguishable for a time in the early eighteenth century. From then on, travel literature would often exemplify a more complex, or at least less straightforward, relation between experience and language than one might expect.

The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Haggerty
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Dysfunctional Family ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Sexual Transgression ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
History Of

Abstract In classic gothic fiction (between 1764 and 1820) a Mediterranean setting invites the expansion of Roman Catholic motifs, and indeed Catholicism itself becomes a standard and flexible trope in gothic fiction. The monastery, the convent, religious life, confessions and confessionals, nuns, monks, and friars are familiar features in gothic novels. “The Horrors of Catholicism” discusses the ways in which gothic writers use these materials to motivate their tales and what doing so means in the context of anti-Catholic eighteenth-century England. I explain how Catholic motifs can be understood in relation to other central gothic obsessions, such as sexual transgression and dysfunctional family life, and I demonstrate how these features aid novelists in exploring what would later be understood as personal sexual identity. In that way, these writers contribute to what we understand as the history of sexuality.

scholarly journals Pleas for Respectability: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Theorizing the Novel

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Amelia Precup
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract The emergence and development of the modern novel used to be viewed as a largely masculine affair. However, over the past few decades, researchers and scholars have started to re-evaluate and acknowledge the importance of women’s literary and theoretical work to the rise and evolution of the genre. This article adds to these revisionist efforts by contributing to the ongoing discussion on the theoretical legacy left by some of the most notable British women writers of the long eighteenth century. The article analyses several texts (prefaces, dedications, dialogues, essays, reviews) in which they expressed their perspectives on questions situated at the core of the eighteenth-century debates concerning the novel. The critical and theoretical perspectives advanced by these writers are approached as contributions to the novel’s status as a respectable literary genre and, implicitly, as self-legitimizing efforts.

Early Gothic Novels and the Belief in Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Gothic Novels

This chapter looks at Gothic novels. A Gothic Romance or even ‘a Gothic Story’ may be one thing, but a Gothic Novel is something else again. Though that term has been retrospectively applied to a body of macabre, sensational, ghost-infested fiction from the late eighteenth century only since the early twentieth, in its suggestion of a perverse hybridizing of the outmoded and the up-to-date it aptly captures the transgressiveness these fictions represented for their original critics. More directly than the contemporary fictions that aspired to be life-like and observe the norms of probability, Gothic novels foreground that peculiar mental gymnastics that since the eighteenth century has enabled readers to participate in a secular culture industry ‘which invites the subtle and supple deployment of belief’. In this sense, by helping to define the frontiers of the fictive, the Gothic mode did not interrupt the rise of the novel, but instead completed it.

The Library of Bryant Barrett, Laceman and Country Squire

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-572
Author(s):  
Frans Korsten ◽  
Jos Blom ◽  
Frans Blom
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Insight Into

Bryant Barrett (c.1715–1790) was a Catholic tradesman who managed to become affluent enough to be able to collect a library of nearly 2,000 volumes. His library catalogues are still extant and the aim of the present article is to analyse these in order to get an insight into the intellectual world of an eighteenth-century RC self-made man. There are a number of catalogues of institutional RC libraries and the occasional catalogue of an RC clergyman, but as far as we know the Barrett catalogues are a unique register of the books possessed by an ‘ordinary’ RC layman. The traditional picture of eighteenth-century English Catholic life is that of a dwindling community with a rather provincial and conservative outlook on life. Heroic martyrdom was a feature of the past: ordinary life entailed guarding against modern enlightenment views and – towards the end of the century – internal discussions about the concessions necessary to achieve Catholic emancipation. Barrett's library modifies this picture in a number of ways: it reveals an eminently practical man who was also an intellectual, someone interested in the past, loyal to his faith, knowledgeable about the latest developments in industry and science, intrigued by perspectives opening up through exploration and travel, fascinated with new developments and ideas. Barrett was a both a devout Roman Catholic and a well-read man of the world.

English Convents in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 219-231
Author(s):  
Caroline Watkinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Enclosed Space ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Civilized Society

‘A Nun’s dress is a very becoming one’, wrote Cornelius Cayley in 1772. Similarly, Philip Thicknesse, witnessing the clothing ceremony at the English Augustinian convent in Paris, observed that the nun’s dress was ‘quite white, and no ways unbecoming … [it] did not render her in my eyes, a whit less proper for the affections of the world’. This tendency to objectify nuns by focusing on the mysterious and sexualized aspects of conventual life was a key feature of eighteenth-century British culture. Novels, poems and polemic dwelt on the theme of the forced vocation, culminating in the dramatic portrayals of immured nuns in the Gothic novels of the 1790s. The convent was portrayed as inherently despotic, its unnatural hierarchy and silent culture directly opposed to the sociability which, in Enlightenment thought, defined a civilized society. This despotic climate was one aspect of a culture of tyranny and constraint, which rendered nuns either innocent and victimized or complicit and immoral. Historians have noted that these stereotypes were remarkably similar to those applied to the Orient and have thus extended Said’s notion of ‘otherness’ - the self-affirmation of a dominant culture as a norm from which other cultures deviate – to apply not merely to oriental cultures but to those aspects of European culture deemed exotic. In so doing, they have challenged the notion that travel writing was an exact record of social experience and have initiated a more nuanced understanding of textual convention and authorial experience. For historians of eighteenth-century Britain this has led to an examination of the construction of anti-Catholicism within travel literature and its use as an ideology around which the Protestant nation could unite. Thus, Jeremy Black has noted that anti-Catholicism remained the ‘prime ideological stance in Britain’ and has claimed that encounters with Catholicism by British travellers in France ‘excited fear or unease … and, at times, humour or ridicule’. Likewise, Bryan Dolan and Christopher Hibbert have seen encounters with continental convents culminating in negative descriptions of rituals, relics and enclosed space.

Hydraulic Laboratory at University of Liège

2018 ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Willi H. Hager
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
The Novel ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Current Position ◽  
Professional Background ◽  
The Past ◽  
Comprehensive Picture

The Hydraulic Laboratory of Liège University, Belgium, is historically considered from its foundation in 1937 to the mid-1960s. The technical facilities of the various Buildings are highlighted, along with canals and instrumentation available. It is noted that in its initial era, comparatively few basic research has been conducted, mainly due to the professional background of the professors leading the establishment. This state was improved in the past 50 years, however, particularly since the Laboratory was dislocated to its current position in the novel University Campus. Biographies of the leading persons associated with the Liège Hydraulic Laboratory are also presented, so that a comprehensive picture is given of one of the currently leading hydraulic Laboratories of Europe.

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