Home » Items tagged with 'gothic'
Items tagged with 'gothic'
Article: Reading Frankenstein in 1818
1818, the year of Frankenstein’s first publication, is a frequently overlooked context for Mary Shelley’s novel, overshadowed as it is both by Frankenstein’s afterlives and by the moment of its first conception in Switzerland, 1816, the ‘Year Without a Summer’. What might it mean for a novel that has transcended literary history and achieved mythic status to be re-situated as one of the novels of 1818? The article considers recent topics of critical interest, including ecocritical readings of the novel in the shadow of Mount Tambora and the topicality of the frame narrative in relation to histories of arctic exploration, before focusing on the politics of Frankenstein. Many critics have read the novel as a belated allegory of the French Revolution, which leads inexorably towards an interpretation of Frankenstein as an anti-revolutionary fiction. For the readers of 1818, however, it is the unfolding events of post-Waterloo Britain, not the French Revolution, that constitutes the primary political context, producing a more open-ended and radical text. The final section of the article reads the novel in dialogue with William Hazlitt’s essay, ‘What Is the People?’, showing how both texts engage with questions agitated by the popular reform movement, including responses to tyranny and the sovereignty of the people. Continue reading
Article: Mandeville, Mourning and National Myths
Mandeville (1817) is the second of William Godwin’s historical novels, and is set during the period of the English Commonwealth (1649–60). Readers at the time of its publication made comparisons with the ‘German school’ of novel writing, linking it with both the gothic and sturm-und-drang fictional modes. Modern critics have recognised it as a work exploring psychological and cultural trauma, the aftereffects of war on the generation that came after. Godwin cited Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Joanna Bailie’s De Monfort (1798) as major influences on the novel, and this essay will attempt to use these texts as a vector to explore the direction of Godwin’s ideas. Continue reading
Article: The Romance of Commerce
Scott’s Waverley novels often turn on an opposition between romance—the realm of the unexpected, marvellous and heroic—and real life—the often disappointing realm of the mundane and factual. However, Rob Roy, offers readers no alternative to romance. Instead it is made up of different kinds of romance—namely the gothic and the adventure story or imperial romance. Scott maps the genre of the gothic onto Northumberland, where the remnants of feudalism still prevail, and wealth consists in landed property transmitted across generations. The adventure story, by contrast, links the Scottish Highlands with southern metropolitan Britain through a system of speculation and credit. Rob Roy reflects on Scott’s imbrication in these two systems at the time of the novel’s writing—a period of economic depression and rural depopulation—as he sold metropolitan readers another romanticised image of the Highlands in order to shore up his own landed property. Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism XXXVI: Romantic Melodrama
As part of this ongoing series on Teaching Romanticism we will consider the ways in which we lecture on and discuss individual authors, whether during author-specific modules or broader period surveys. We thought it would … Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism XXXV: Teaching Social Justice
As part of this ongoing series on Teaching Romanticism we will consider the ways in which we lecture on and discuss individual authors, whether during author-specific modules or broader period surveys. We thought it would … Continue reading
Article: Sad Realities
Charles Harpur (1813–68) is recognised in his native Australia as a pioneering Romantic poet, but his achievements are little recognised elsewhere. This essay considers his contribution to the development of Romantic tragedy. He wrote two tragedies, The Bushrangers (1853, orig. 1835), a gothic bandit drama in the tradition of Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), and King Saul (c. 1838), an incomplete Biblical drama apparently inspired by Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821). Like many European playwrights of the period, Harpur was deeply influenced by the new kinds of melodrama that were sweeping the stage, but also sought to distinguish his literary productions from more popular fare. His alienation from the popular theatre was exacerbated by his colonial context, where strict censorship, rising snobbery and plentiful cultural imports from Britain stifled the early efforts of nationalist, convict-born writers like himself. These contexts help to explain three distinctive aspects of Harpur’s Romantic tragedies: they were direct in an age when drama was often evasive, radical even in an age of revolution, and mystical in an age of increasing religious scepticism. Whatever his theatrical merits, Harpur was a bold playwright who worked through controversial political and aesthetic problems in a remarkably explicit way. Continue reading
Article: Isabella Kelly and the Minerva Gothic Challenge
This essay uses Isabella Kelly (c. 1759–1857) to demonstrate the critical and historical value of Minerva novelists for gothic scholarship. Minerva’s fictions have traditionally been dismissed by gothic critics as uninteresting ‘imitations’ of Radcliffe and Lewis. I propose that we need to question this too-simple label: rather than disqualifying them from serious study, Minerva novels’ formulaic gothic elements are an entry point for fertile analysis, exposing a lively dialogue between many novels that is itself an under-examined part of the gothic’s history. I also address the dilemma of scope: should gothic scholars read Minerva novels individually and closely, or as a large mass viewed from afar? Drawing on the insights of recent scholarship, I propose that there are unique benefits to a combined perspective, which recognises the potential richness of individual Minerva gothics while noting the distinctive features that arise from their publication as part of a larger mass. Isabella Kelly’s seven Minerva novels allow me to test both of these methodological assertions. A ‘semi-distant’ overview of Kelly’s career reveals her rapidly changing, diverse and creative use of gothic materials over time, exposing an aspect of gothic authorship not visible in traditional accounts. I then zoom in on a single Kelly novel, The Ruins of Avondale Priory (1796), to show the surprisingly complex, idiosyncratic uses to which she puts familiar tropes. Examined closely, Kelly’s novel proves less an ‘imitation’of canonical gothics than one in a chain of adaptations to which those more famous works also belong. Kelly’s case also shows how Minerva novels challenge critical categories formed on the basis of the canon alone, such as the supposed division of gothic fiction into distinct ‘male’ and ‘female’ strands. Continue reading
Article: Imitation, Intertextuality and the Minerva Novel
Jane Austen’s famous reference to Ann Radcliffe and ‘all her imitators’ in Northanger Abbey can be understood both as a satirical characterisation of popular gothic novels and as a record of a historical mode of describing those same texts. This article provides a new reading of fictional ‘imitation’ in the Romantic period arguing that, as it was practised by Minerva Press novelists, it became a crucial fulcrum in the ongoing Romantic debate over the literary status of the novel. While charges of ‘imitation’ are often understood as derogatory, and were frequently deployed against the Minerva Press’s fiction by critics, looking closely at the novels in question suggests that many novelists used imitation quite deliberately as a literary strategy. This essay suggests that the fiction produced by Minerva’s novelists is deeply entwined with the press’s status as England’s highest-producing novel publisher, in that the form and function of Minerva novels stems from their collective identity: each novel is produced and consumed specifically as one of many—one of many narratives, but also one of many physical, circulating objects, lent, sold and exchanged between readers. Using allusions, parodic inversions, self-referential prefaces and a multitude of other narrative strategies, the novelists exploit the creative potential of their imitative parameters. Continue reading
Article: Transatlantic Terror
This essay examines the cataloguing practices of James Hammond, the proprietor of a large nineteenth-century New England circulating library, and the marginalia in his collection of sixty-five Minerva Press gothic novels, which were later acquired by the New York Society Library in New York City. Hammond’s catalogues, four of which are examined here, arranged and altered Minerva titles and authors and appended reviews. These promotional strategies foregrounded the gothic content of these novels and attested to their quality. In so doing, the catalogues assisted subscribers in selecting books and prepared them for reading those selections. If Hammond’s catalogs prepared patrons for quality gothic reading experiences, the novels’ marginalia reshaped patrons’ expectations and influenced their engagement with the novels. Written by other subscribers or earlier readers, these marginalia evaluated the novels and commented on their gothic and non-gothic elements. In the process, the marginalia sometimes supported, and at other times conflicted with, Hammond’s promotional strategies. For Hammond’s patrons, the catalogues and the marginalia constituted two points of entry into the Minerva gothic novel. Only by examining both the catalogues and the marginalia can scholars assess the degree to which Minerva’s gothic novels terrified and delighted New England readers decades after the press’s London heyday. Continue reading
Article: Historical Gothic and the Minerva Press
Through the exploration of a selection of Minerva titles from across the period of the Press’s dominance (1790–99), focusing on the recurring trope of violence, its varying portrayals by individual authors, and its censure by critics, this essay argues that the Press makes a unique contribution to the Romantic literary marketplace with regard to its output of violent gothic fiction. In particular, it proposes that what some Minerva authors were doing was cleverly combining gothic sensationalism with historical fact, thereby allowing Lane’s press to gain popularity by catering to the fashion for violent gothic novels while simultaneously responding to rhetoric about the corrupting influence of such violence on female readers. In addition to this, at a time when historical writing was not showcasing the horrors of war that women were experiencing, the use of gothic conventions when writing historical conflicts permitted writers to do exactly that—the implication being that Minerva authors’ use of gothic violence was not simply to entertain, but also to portray the horrors of war and its impact on women and the domestic space. Taken together, the use of historical facts alongside gothic tropes in Minerva Press works allows for a confident evaluation of the formation of an historical gothic mode. Continue reading
Review: Jakub Lipski and Jacek Mydla (eds), The Enchantress of Words, Sounds and Image (rev.)
Described by Thomas de Quincey as ‘the great enchantress of [her] generation’, Ann Radcliffe has long been identified as the author whose work contributed more than that of any other to the popularity of Gothic … Continue reading
Article: ‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort’
This article shifts attention away from the perfections of England to explore the place of Ireland in Jane Austen’s Emma. Intrigued by Jane Fairfax’s refusal to travel with the Dixons in Ireland, Emma conjectures spitefully about an unrequited—or possibly consummated—affair between Jane and Mr Dixon. Obfuscating his actual affair with Jane, Frank Churchill uses Emma’s Irish conjectures to flirt with both women. Ireland becomes a repository of gothic potential over the course of Austen’s novel: a space upon which characters can map their unspoken and unspeakable desires. Austen accesses the Irish gothic to ask questions about national identity, legitimacy and power. Continue reading
Review: Chase Pielak, Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period (rev.)
Chase Pielak’s Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period explores the disruptive potential of animals in British Romantic literature and the surprising encounters that they induce, both in life and from beyond the grave. For this … Continue reading
Post: Bluebooks and Gothic Chapbooks [Part II]: Midnight Horrors
paLaura Kremmel is beginning the last year of her PhD at Lehigh University, completing a dissertation that considers the ways in which Romantic-era Gothic literature picks up the theories of late eighteenth century medicine. She has … Continue reading
Post: Bluebooks and Gothic Chapbooks [Part I]
Laura Kremmel is beginning the last year of her PhD at Lehigh University, completing a dissertation that considers the ways in which Romantic-era Gothic literature picks up the theories of late eighteenth century medicine. She … Continue reading
Post: Victorian Legacies: The French Revolution’s Reign of Gothic Terror
There are quarrels in which even Satan, bringing help, were not unwelcome; even Satan, fighting stiffly, might cover himself with glory,—of a temporary sort.—Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (1837), p. 87 The French Revolution … Continue reading
Post: Victorian Legacies: Sir Walter Scott in Context
by Emma Butcher The blow is struck—the lyre is shattered–the music is hushed at length. The greatest—the most various–the most commanding genius of modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his … Continue reading
Post: Review: Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. British Library, 3 Oct 2014–20 January 2015
by Sarah Sharp Many British readers will perhaps first encounter the concept of the Gothic, not through a Gothic novel, but through Northanger Abbey’s playful engagement with the genre’s key tropes. They will have perhaps, … Continue reading
Post: Conference report for Ann Radcliffe at 250: Gothic and Romantic Imaginations
It was a question that had eighteenth-century, gothic and Romantic scholars and enthusiasts scratching their heads: how exactly should one celebrate the 250th birthday of Ann Radcliffe, one of the best-selling and most influential writers … Continue reading
Report: A Grammar of Gothic: Report on a Research Project on the Forms of the Gothic Genre
The Northanger Library Project (HUM2006-03404) was a three-year state-sponsored project (2006–09) that sought to study the rise of gothic literature against the background of the ‘long’ eighteenth century in Britain. The central concern of the … Continue reading
Post: BARS 2015: Romantic Imprints – 1st Call for Papers
Proposals are invited for the 2015 British Association for Romantic Studies international conference which will be held at Cardiff University, Wales (UK) on 16–19 July 2015. The theme of the interdisciplinary conference is Romantic Imprints, … Continue reading
Post: Owl Country: Illustrating Scotland through the Gothic in an Obscure Eighteenth-Century Travelogue
by Mark Bennett To recap, for anyone who missed (or has understandably forgotten) my first two posts, I’m a PhD student working on eighteenth-century Gothic and travel writing. In a nutshell, I consider travel literature … Continue reading
Post: ‘Bits of Burke’: A Gruesome Historic Walking Tour of Old Edinburgh
As I mentioned in my first blog for this site, the history and literature of Romantic-era Scotland is littered with grisly deaths and disturbed graves. Today I’m focusing in on a particularly infamous moment in … Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism IV: Taught Masters
by Daniel Cook At this time of year we begin to field queries, and applications, for our Taught Masters programmes. As it happens, the postgraduate committee in the School of Humanities at Dundee have also … Continue reading
Post: Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, Story 2: Les Portraits de famille
As noted in my previous blogs on Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, the first story read by the Byron-Shelley circle on that stormy night in June 1816, ‘L’Amour muet’, was not as influential and well-known as the … Continue reading
Post: Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, Story 1: L’Amour muet
by Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Happy New Year Everyone! My introductory blog ‘last year’ – actually only a few weeks ago – provided a brief overview of Fantasmagoriana (1812) the text that inspired the famous ghost-storytelling contest at … Continue reading
Post: Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana: An Introductory Blog
by Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Greetings Fellow Romanticists and Print Culturists, I am excited about my first blog-posting for Romantic Textualities. Thanks to the editors for the opportunity and their assistance. Like many of us, ever … Continue reading
Post: More Gothic and Travel Writing: Touring my PhD Aboard a few of its Hobby Horses
by Mark Bennett In my previous blog I talked generally about my PhD and some of the developments that lead it to take its present form. In this blog I’d like to look at two … Continue reading
Post: Gothic and Travel Writing
Gothic and Travel Writing; or How a PhD Student makes the Journey from Victorianism to the Late Eighteenth Century by Mark Bennett Hello all. First up, I’d like to thank the team at Romantic Textualities … Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism I: A Beginner’s Guide
by Daniel Cook When I moved to Scotland last year to take up a permanent post as a Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee I inherited a popular module entitled Romantic and Gothic … Continue reading
Post: Conference report for Four Nations Fiction: Women and the Novel, 1780-1830
It’s not often that you get the chance to go to a conference which will involve a trip to the pier, a day spent at one of Wales’ national treasures, and introductions to several undeservedly-forgotten … Continue reading
Report: Merely an Imitator?
In this report, I want to float what I consider to be a distinct possibility: that Ann Radcliffe did not cease publication after The Italian (1797), but published two anonymous novels for the circulating library … Continue reading
Review: Jim Kelly (ed.), Ireland and Romanticism (rev.)
Did Ireland experience Romanticism? Certainly not in the uncomplicated way that scholarship assumes England, Germany and other countries did. In Romanticism in National Context (1988), Tom Dunne’s contribution eschews the standard chapter title form—‘Romanticism in … Continue reading
Article: ‘The Gothic Novel in Wales’ Revisited
I James Henderson’s article ‘The Gothic Novel in Wales (1790–1820)’ provides a useful starting point for a study of Wales-related fiction of the romantic period. [1] Examining the extent to which Wales was used as … Continue reading
