Search results
You are looking at 11 - 20 of 26 items for
- Author: Robert Miles x
- Refine by access: All content x
Portraying a continent disfigured by the Inquisition, Jesuitical conspiracy, and mob violence, Charles Maturin's most famous novel has often been taken as the high-water mark of Gothic anti-Catholicism and Europhobia. Turning to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the prototype of Gothic romance, is the quickest way of taking one's generic bearings when discussing early Gothic. The tendency of the Shakespearian romance plot to come unstuck in the Gothic is attributable to the cultural ambivalence generated by the Glorious Revolution. The settlement that followed left Englishmen imaginatively suspended between Divine Right and the ancient constitution, or monarchy and abstract rights. The representation of the European other in early Gothic, is not part of a single binary of Protestant/Catholic, Briton/European, but a complex fabric 'haunted' by the issue of legitimacy inevitably provoked by the task of forging nations.
Matthew Lewis's The Monk begins with an apparent non sequitur. The Monk's subversion of sensibility may have panicked Ann Radcliffe into a riposte, one imposing closure on Lewis's worrying gaps, but it also prompted a reassessment of her earlier work. Radcliffe's reassertion of the denotative function of language pulls The Italian back towards naturalism, as is evident from her stress on the veridical genealogy of her text. Radcliffe's development of the female Gothic sublime and interiority may be seen as examples of self-fulfilling exercises of power within a 'despotic' context; The Italian differs in trying to analyse that context. Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: Or, The Moor, is in two respects a female version of Lewis's The Monk. A woman, Victoria di Loredani, occupies Ambrosio's role, while the sexual politics of the Gothic are viewed from a feminist perspective.
The author argues that the readers should not understand the Gothic as a set of prose conventions, but as a discursive site crossing the genres. He argues that a suppression of this understanding of the Gothic seriously decontextualizes Christabel and its immediate ripostes, The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia. He counters the bias whereby the Gothic is read as a prose genre, a bias not shared by Coleridge, Walter Scott and Byron. They understood poetry to be the most fashionable medium for the Gothic tale of the supernatural. Christabel's status as a Gothic tale of the supernatural is universally accepted. The author argues that The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia establish a polemical conversation with Christabel and the Gothic. In this conversation the Gothic emerges as a language of subjective representation, for that nexus of tropes that includes the self, the body, boundaries, invasion, transgression, repression and desire.
The Gothic aesthetic and hygienic self gain their particular accents during the latter half of the eighteenth century; during the nineteenth, they become less distinct while others are heard. This chapter addresses the effect this had on Gothic writing during the 1820s and beyond and the genealogical consequences. Byron's Werner; or, The Inheritance: A Tragedy, a dramatic adaptation of Harriet Lee's novella, The German's Tale: Kruitzner, is an instance of rewriting at the margins of the Gothics classic period. The geographical and temporal setting, 'Germany' in 1633, towards the end of the Thirty Years War, highlights the 'Gothic cusp', a period when the feudal and modern eras were understood to overlap. Insofar as Kruitzner sets it out as typical, the house of Siegendorf, like all Gothic houses, is based on 'mystery and blood', violence shrouded by an obscurantist myth of noble origin.
The aim of this book is to make available a body of texts connected with the cultural phenomenon known as Gothic writing. The book includes many of the critical writings and reviews which helped to constitute Gothic as a distinct genre, by revisions of the standards of taste, by critique and by outright attack. Together, this material represents a substantial part of the discursive hinterland of Gothic. The chapters on supernaturalism, on the aesthetics of Gothic, and on opposition to Gothic contain a number of the standard references in any history of the genre. They are juxtaposed with other more novel items of journalism, religious propaganda, folk tradition, non-fictional narrative, poetry and so on. The book also includes chapters on the politics of Gothic, before and after the French Revolution. Therefore, it includes extracts from Tacitus and Montesquieu, the authorities that eighteenth-century commentators most often referred to. The story of Britain's Gothic origins, although implicitly progressivist, was to be re-fashioned in the cultural and sociological theories critical of modern society: that vital eighteenth-century trend known as primitivism. The book also broadly covers the period from the height of the Gothic vogue (in the mid-1790s) to the mid-nineteenth century. The author hopes that the book will encourage students to follow new routes, make new connections, and enable them to read set works on the syllabus in more adventurous and historically informed ways.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to make available a body of texts connected with the cultural phenomenon known as Gothic writing. Some of the texts document the ideological and aesthetic environment which gave rise to the new form of writing; its conditions of possibility. The book includes many of the critical writings and reviews which helped to constitute Gothic as a distinct genre, by revisions of the standards of taste, by critique and by outright attack. It covers the period from 1700-1820 of the Gothic vogue to the mid nineteenth century. The book contains a number of the standard references in any history of the genre, which it would be perverse to exclude. It includes extracts from Tacitus and Montesquieu, the authorities eighteenth-century commentators most often referred to.
This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1706 and 1750 connected with supernaturalism. It is a commonplace that Gothic writing developed in reaction against the rules of neo-classical criticism. The aim of John Dennis's treatise as a whole was to show the necessary interdependence of religion and poetry, and the importance of strong emotions in both. Shakespeare saw how useful the popular superstitions had been to the ancient poets: he felt that they were necessary to poetry itself. Although William Collins ostensibly eschews the use of 'false themes' for himself, his emotive treatment of the supernatural material he recommends to Home makes him a precursor of the Gothic novelists. In the 1790s, Ann Radcliffe frequently cited his poetry in her fiction and journals.
This chapter contains collection of texts between 1777 and 1818 connected with Gothic origins. In terms of debate about Gothic origins, Thomas Warton's other main contribution was his controversial claim that romance was ultimately of Saracen origin. Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Germania of Cornelius Tacitus are two important classical sources for the political debate on the Goths. The most striking feature of the Letters is Richard Hurd's insistence that Gothic art has its own distinct logic, derived from the social structure of feudalism, and its cultural expression, chivalry. The works of 'Ossian' appeared at the same time as the first Gothic fictions, and together they represented a new area of taste within literary culture. In the Dissertation, John Pinkerton takes issue with earlier writers on a variety of points, including the place of origin of the Goths, which he locates in Scythia, in the Middle East.
This chapter contains collection of texts between 1670 and 1826 connected with the Gothic Aesthetic. A rash of translations from the German in the early 1790s, including Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's novella The Ghost-Seer, had a decisive impact on the development of Gothic fiction in Britain. Ann Radcliffe's final work of fiction, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously in 1826. This was first published separately in the New Monthly Magazine, as an independent essay in aesthetic theory. It suggests the continuing importance of Shakespeare, and contemporary methods of staging his plays, as an example for modern writers employing effects of terror, specifically the supernatural. The originality of William Collins's Ode lies in the fact that personified Fear is positively wooed rather than avoided by the aspiring poet. It can be measured against another, far more conventional, 'Ode to Fear' by Andrew Erskine.