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.
Este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar la primera novela gótica del género fantástico en inglés, The Castle of Otranto (1764), escrita por Horace Walpole, así como su primera traducción en francés, llevada a cabo por Marc-Antoine Eidous en 1767 y titulada Le Château d’Otrante. Dada la importancia de esta obra como origen de la literatura fantástica, que representó un primer indicio del romanticismo y una ruptura con los valores de la Ilustración del siglo XVIII, este estudio pretende analizar los procedimientos de formación utilizados en la traducción al francés para establecer conclusiones en relación con la recepción de la obra y las corrientes literarias y estéticas de la época.
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.
La traducción de la primera novela gótica inglesa al francés: análisis de las técnicas de traducción utilizadas en The Castle of Otranto de Horace Walpole
