Dangers, Delights, Development: Female Travel in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Turkish Embassy Letters

This paper examines the portrayal of travel for women in two eighteenth-century literary texts by women writers: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. With a focus on the mental, emotional, and psychological effects of female travel that each author depicts, it analyzes both the dramatic dangers and pleasures faced by Radcliffe’s Gothic heroine and the more mild, cerebral ones experienced by the historical Montagu. Drawing on the work of Marianna D’Ezio, Adam Watkins, and Mary Jo Kietzman, it argues that both Radcliffe and Montagu ultimately endorsed the idea of travel for women through their work, portraying the pleasure, experience, and self-cultivation it afforded as outweighing its dangers. Finally, it posits that this position resisted both Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of appropriate female behaviours and desires by encouraging women readers to experience the world outside of the domestic sphere.

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

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.

The Pictorial Paradigm of La Vallée: A Text-Image Reading of the Incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho

In this article, Alice Labourg is dedicated to the question of pictoriality in the incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Close formal analysis enables to understand how the pictorial impression many readers have felt is created through language and its generation of a powerful iconotextual landscape. Painting is embedded in the very fabric of the text through a pictorial writing which operates on two complementary modes, first on an iconic and figurative level which presents the reader with various picture-like scenes, then on a more diffused, semiotic dimension which translates painting as a plastic signifier within the linguistic materiality.

The Gothic Element in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho

The paper attempts to analyse the gothic element in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The paper presents the study in the essay form and it begins with a presentation of the gothic romance and its significance, characteristics and nature as a genre and in the novel of this study. The paper points out the types of the gothic school for Radcliffe is a representative of the school of terror while Lewis the school of horror. The study concentrates on Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as a gothic romance which narrates the story of Emily St. Aubert, and Valencourt, who faced a thousand obstacles, and perils thrown in their way. The heroine finds herself separated from the man she loves, and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt's new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her. The study ends with a conclusion that states the main ideas in the study. Key words: Gothic element, Gothic Romamce, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, terror, horror

The Supernatural Subject of the Sublime in Burke and Radcliffe: A Reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho

The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), arguing that it reflects Radcliffe’s ideas on the matter, described in her theoretical work On the Supernatural in Poetry (1826). Following Walter Scott’s representation of Radcliffe in his work Lives of the Novelists (1825), her works have been associated with the concept of the explained supernatural. The articles argues that the supernatural present in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) complicates the subjective safety implied by the explained supernatural, a complication visible in the novel’s narrative closure.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances

This chapter examines the role of classical literature in the life and writings of Ann Radcliffe. A strong case can be made for Radcliffe’s awareness of, and interest in, classical literature, even if it is impossible to claim decisively that she could read Latin. First, it examines allusions to Greek and Roman antiquity in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). These allusions are used to articulate an ethical sensibility for these novels’ heroines: they are susceptible to the grandeur and sublimity of the classical world, and yet direct their attention and sympathy not to heroes or leaders but to the innocent victims of grand ambition. The second part of the chapter examines Radcliffe’s work of travel literature. In this work, the Roman historian Tacitus is quoted in Latin three times, in each case to describe the traces of war and suffering in the places that Radcliffe and her husband visit. Finally, the chapter turns to Radcliffe’s final novel published in her lifetime, The Italian (1797), in which the eroticism of Herculaneum wall paintings, and the shadowy walls of a Roman fort are sources of terror for the novel’s heroine and hero.

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a recepção inicial de The Mysteries of Udolpho, terceiro romance de Ann Radcliffe. O artigo investiga o debate acerca do sobrenatural na obra e como este mobilizou questões centrais acerca do desenvolvimento do romance e da crítica literária no século XVIII.Palavras-chave: fantástico; romance gótico; crítica literária

Grad School Gothic: The Mysteries of Udolpho and the Academic #MeToo Movement

In the age of #MeToo, the Female Gothic rises from the critical crypt once again. Examining the educational narrative of Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, I argue that the Female Gothic has always vividly portrayed emotional invalidation – a term borrowed from cognitive psychologist Marsha Linehan – as a tool to silence righteous, yet naïve, voices and perpetuate imbalances of social power. As the recent #MeToo movement in academic culture demonstrates, the fourth-wave feminist critique of workplace discrimination targets not only sexual misconduct, but also intellectual misconduct. I propose that, often, discrimination in academic spaces uses the very same tool portrayed in the Female Gothic. In this paper, I look to the Female Gothic as well as to feminist pedagogical theory to offer solutions to the problem of emotional invalidation in the Grad School Gothic.