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Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon-Formation
... Today, Gothic romances like The Magic Goblet may come across as artistically awkward, but Flygare-Carlén's commercial success speaks to her astuteness with regard to format; this was the type of literature that regular people actually read (Leffler, 1994(Leffler, , 2022a. Gamer (2000) referred to the Gothic as a mediator between art and mass culture. Writing about gender and mating for multiple audiences with conflicting desires tended to polarize. ...
A common stance is that only reading literary fiction improves theory of mind (ToM). Characters in popular fiction are said to be so predictable that they merely reaffirm readers’ expectations. Emilie Flygare-Carlén was Sweden’s bestselling 19th-century novelist, but literary historians have disregarded her works for being too commercial and her insights into mating for being too conservative. This article analyzes her novel The Magic Goblet (1840–1841) to propose a more complex understanding of the relationship between fiction and ToM. Flygare-Carlén dissects the mating regime of the Romantic Century (1750–1850) with exceptional psychological depth, yet conveys her insights through widely compelling genres. In this Gothic romance, she dramatizes how the transition from parental to individual choice—in combination with a new mating morality—made women more vulnerable to predatorial seducers. The late-Romantic sanctification of erotic and romantic attraction compelled women to obsess with the small number of men who are able immediately to trigger the strongest emotions. The Magic Goblet’s hero–villain, whose personality is marked by Dark Triad traits, successfully stages himself as the ideal man, but his antisocial mating strategies have detrimental consequences for the women who pursue him and for himself. Flygare-Carlén offers readers insights into not only Dark Triad minds, but into weaknesses of their own thinking, and into the impact ideology can have on our minds. Her doing so in a popular genre does not detract from The Magic Goblet’s potential for improving readers’ ToM.
... For further studies that relate the Gothic with the Romantics, see Hume (1969), and Platzner and Hume (1971). For the reception of the Gothic works by the Romantics, see Gamer (2000). concerns of "Male Gothic" as formulated by Miles come out as significantly deficient compared with those of "Female Gothic." ...
Abstract This study of Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19th century aims at relocating the social relevance of both the story and Gothic literature in the contentious zone between the private and public sphere. The story vacillates between private and public realms, drawing its vampiric theme from such vacillations. It expresses the horrors of vampiric intimacy inherent in private life, which opposes the moral character of the public realm. The most dangerous sites of private life are represented as the realm of the imagination and that of intersubjective intimacy. The story also contains several prominent Romantic tropes, including nature and orientalism, all pointing to the intimate dangers of the private realm. Lord Ruthven, Polidori’s “vampire” is an explosive figure at the fraught intersection between a private life that demands secrecy for its private pleasures, and a public realm that demands exposure to regulate and control.
Keywords: Private Life, Public, Gaze, Intimacy, Gothic, Romance, Vampire
... For further studies that relate the Gothic with the Romantics, see Hume (1969), and Platzner and Hume (1971). For the reception of the Gothic works by the Romantics, see Gamer (2000). concerns of "Male Gothic" as formulated by Miles come out as significantly deficient compared with those of "Female Gothic." ...
This study of Polidori's story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19th century aims at relocating the social relevance of both the story and Gothic literature in the contentious zone between the private and public sphere. The story vacillates between private and public realms, drawing its vampiric theme from such vacillations. It expresses the horrors of vampiric intimacy inherent in private life, which opposes the moral character of the public realm. The most dangerous sites of private life are represented as the realm of the imagination and that of intersubjective intimacy. The story also contains several prominent Romantic tropes, including nature and orientalism, all pointing to the intimate dangers of the private realm. Lord Ruthven, Polidori's “vampire” is an explosive figure at the fraught intersection between a private life that demands secrecy for its private pleasures, and a public realm that demands exposure to regulate and control.
... For example, Diana Wallace demonstrates the profound influence that Sophia Lee's brand of historical Gothic in The Recess has on Radcliffe and the historical novel generally (Wallace, 2013: 25-66). At the same time, as several critics have noted, the Gothic mode transcends traditional genres and extends well beyond the novel (Williams, 1995 andGamer, 2000). Women wrote important Gothic poetry (for example, Mary Robinson's "Haunted Beach"), plays (for example, Joanna Baillie's Orra), and chapbooks too numerous to name. ...
This article examines the reception history of women-authored Gothic texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, arguing that the generic descriptor “Female Gothic” more accurately reflects the ideological goals of second-wave feminist literary criticism than the narratives of early women Gothic writers. While several critics have attempted to destabilize the term Female Gothic, its usage persists as a short-hand form to describe narratives in which distressed female heroines are imprisoned in the domestic sphere and threatened with extortion, rape and forced marriage. This essay asks why criticism clings to an understanding of this genre as one depicting female victimization despite overwhelming textual evidence that represents a much more complicated picture of women’s use and engagement with the Gothic mode. It is argued that the answer to this question rests in looking at how Gothic women’s writing was received in the early nineteenth century and how that reception history shaped the discursive strategies of second-wave feminist literary critics.
... The repertoire of narrative devices associated with Gothic literature in the Western tradition can be traced to the emergence of related literary themes during the mid-to late eighteenth-century boom in popular genre fiction. The genre has been used variously to comment upon the impositions of authority in the Romanticist tradition, and to reinvigorate a sense of cultural identity, bringing narrative liberty to victims, and destruction or banishment to tyrants, and infusing fiction with new possibilities for reader excitation (Castle 2005;Gamer 2000). A familiar array of motifs -such as the spectacle of the decaying fortress castle, visionary symptoms of social disease, compulsive desire, exaggerated force, and the appropriation or exploitation of young or vulnerable individuals -has been widely and variously used in popular text and screen narrative both for entertainment and as a vehicle for comment upon tyranny, inequality and discrimination, from Walpole's (2001) originary Gothic novella Castle of Otranto (1764) to the Kuzui/Whedon film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992). ...
This article discusses the evocation of the Gothic as a narrative interrogation of the intersections between place, identity and power in Andrew McGahan's
The White Earth
(2004). The novel deploys common techniques of Gothic literary fiction to create a sense of disassociation from the grip of a European colonial sensibility. It achieves this in various ways, including by representing its central architectural figure of colonial dominance, Kuran House, as an emblem of aristocratic pastoral decline, then by invoking intimations of an ancient supernatural presence which intercedes in the linear descent of colonial possession and, ultimately, by providing a rational explanation for the novel's events.
The White Earth
further demonstrates the inherently adaptive qualities of Gothic narrative technique as a means of confronting the limits to white belonging in post-colonial Australia by referencing a key historical moment, the 1992
Mabo
judgment, which rejected the concept of
terra nullius
and recognised native title under Australian common law. At once discursive and performative, the sustained way in which the work employs the tropic power of Gothic anxiety serves to reveal the uncertain terms in which its characters negotiate what it means to be Australian, more than 200 years after colonial invasion.
This book defines the cinematic Gothic as an intergeneric, transnational, and transhistorical aesthetics of memory. It suggests that the cross-border movements of those I call ‘travelling directors’ had a crucial impact on the emergence, development, and dissemination of the Gothic. This approach expands the canon to filmmakers and national traditions that have not received much attention in the context of the Gothic and supports an examination of the aesthetic as exilic at its core. I consider memory and processes of manual re-membering to be structural to the aesthetic’s carefully staged ‘sensuous geographies’ (Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place . London: Routledge, 1994). Guided by three key concepts—memory, travelling, and touch—this volume encourages a reappraisal of traditional modes of reading the Gothic by redrawing its scope, retracing its origins, and refocusing attention on surfaces as sites of meaning. In urging the reader to think about the cinematic Gothic in these terms, and through a range of disciplines, this book extends previous scholarship and breaks new ground for investigating not only areas that have eluded critical study, such as the role of hands in film, but also prioritises issues relevant to current academic discourse on memory, migration, and the senses.
This article examines regional engagements with the gothic mode by contemporary writers on either side of the Río de la Plata. The short story “Bajo el Agua Negra” (Mariana Enríquez, 2016) and the novel Mugre Rosa (Fernanda Trías, 2020) both feature figures of monstrous children, toxic rivers, and mutated bodies not only to criticize historical and contemporary social injustices and dominant models of production, but also to imagine a multispecies ethics of care. Through liminal protagonists who simultaneously represent and challenge anthropocentric models, Enríquez and Trías demonstrate a nascent Anthropocene awareness. In both texts, the emergence of non-human storied matter as embodied agency is impossible to ignore, resonating with feminist ecocritical and materialist posthumanist thinkers. However, far from awakening a horror that overwhelms and immobilizes the reader, these ambiguous and open-ended speculative visions indicate that something more hopeful might emerge from the destruction of old models.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the image of death in the poem «Mysteries of the Grave» (Misterios de la tumba) by Carlos Augusto Salaverry, one of the most famous representatives of Peruvian Romanticism. The relevance of the topic is determined by the insufficient study of Peruvian literature of the XIX century and the fundamental importance of the mortal problem for the culture and mentality of this country. To achieve the goal, the author solves the following tasks: analyzes the main plot elements of the poem, determines the main features of the image of death, as well as the positioning of this image in the general system of Peruvian Romanticism. The plot of the poem is built around the premature death of a young girl Rose, the suffering of her father and an unexpected awakening from a lethargic sleep. At the same time, the author’s philosophical arguments on the topic of death, immortality and social inequality are no less important than the plot itself so as to better understand the poem. Structurally, the poem is divided into three parts: «In the temple» (En el templo), «In the cemetery» (En el panteón), «In the coffin» (En el féretro). The poem allows the author to distinguish the following components of the image of death. Firstly, its duality (physical death and mental death in the form of oblivion). Secondly, the atheistic vision of death (lack of faith in posthumous existence). Thirdly, the importance of the social aspect of death (cemetery as a city of the dead that reflects social inequality). Fourthly, the absence of apparent national elements, i.e., the universality of the image of death. Thus, the text of the poem allows us to come to a conclusion about the complexity of the image of death in Salaverry´s work.
How do we understand what is normal social behavior outside the parameters that are used to define “mental illness”? Terminological clarity is important in ensuring that our perception of mental illness is not just a theoretical exercise but is invariably connected to our day-to-day lives. A person could appear completely normal while displaying abnormal traits in his or her character. Something like that does not necessarily make them social misfits because they could still be perceived as “normal” for all practical purposes. For an instance of the normalization of the abnormal, I selected the novel Jane Eyre. Far from being a simple, captivating romance, Jane Eyre is not just about a girl struggling for self-respect but also someone who is trapped in a struggle for “normalcy” in the face of potential mental illness. The latter part of my paper revolves around two aspects: one is that we cannot conceive of the Realist novel without seeing that the genre of the novel itself is a product of class and gender-based contradictions. Another factor, specific to Jane Eyre, is that in their desperation to be “normal,” the characters display morbid symptoms of a controlled and by extension deceptive behavior that would qualify for an argument that the novel is a study of mental illness, rather than a picture of a society at harmony with itself. The paper is a critique of normalcy in the face of the fear of falling mentally ill – a fear experienced by the narrator and communicated to the reader. In the process, the paper uses some of the literary aspects of the text to talk about characters in a manner that brings them as close as possible to reality. The characters are not just imaginary beings in the author’s mind, but individuals who could be situated in a social and a historical context. In attempting to examine mental illness in relation to Jane Eyre, the paper pays attention to some of the other characters in the novel such as Helen Burns, Brocklehurst, and St. John Rivers. The colonial dimension of mental illness in the colonizer’s world is also explored.
Dark academia is a fandom-created genre that draws on campus novels and thriller murder mysteries and extrapolates its aesthetic affects from the Gothic. At the heart of dark academia is a story set in a nostalgic academic fantasy that involves murder, a close-knit group of students who are obsessed with each other and detrimentally absorbed in their intellectual pursuits. Using nostalgia theory, I argue that the genre’s theme of darkness in tandem with its affects of nostalgia operate as simulacra for the anxieties experienced in academia and on campuses, specifically for its student body. Dark academia as a genre is a reaction to the political threats to the humanities education, which stands for a reification of the value of a more classical education for the love of learning. But, at the same time, while some bathe academia in a nostalgic light, others have criticized how dark academia turns a blind eye to structural issues inherent in academia for generations. However, dark academia is a contemporary genre that quickly evolves in response to those criticisms. By tracing the history of dark academia and its canon development over the years, I examine how dark academia self-critiques campus nostalgia and unveils the academy’s history of violence against women and racism against people of colour.
Penny Dreadful, which stitches together characters and plot elements from canonical nineteenth-century British horror novels, invites audiences to reflect on its own status as an adaptation whenever it puts curated collections onscreen. One such collection—the anthology—shows up metaphorically through the series’ adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). By repeatedly placing lines from famous Romantic poems in the mouth of the stitched-together being that Victor Frankenstein reanimates, Penny Dreadful acknowledges its medial overlap with the anthology and explores the proposition that individual “being” amounts to a process of self-curation and adaptation from what we read. The essay contends that Penny Dreadful imports this idea from Frankenstein, helping render visible how Shelley’s novel was always in part about its own medial relationship to the anthology.Keywords
Frankenstein
CollectionAnthologyAdaptationCanonization
Opening up the warm body of American Horror – through literature, film, TV, music, video games, and a host of other mediums – this book gathers the leading scholars in the field to dissect the gruesome histories and shocking forms of American life. Through a series of accessible and informed essays, moving from the seventeenth century to the present day, The Cambridge Companion to American Horror explores one of the liveliest and most progressive areas of contemporary culture. From slavery to censorship, from occult forces to monstrous beings, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in America's most terrifying cultural expressions.
The music of Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederic Handel and Domenico Scarlatti received more performances, publications and appreciation in Britain between 1750–1850 than in any other country during this era. The compositions of these three seminal baroque composers were heard in the numerous public and private concerts that proliferated at this time; edited, arranged and published for professionals and amateurs; written about by scholars and journalists; and used as teaching pieces and in pedagogical treatises. This Element examines the reception of their music during this dynamic period in British musical history, and places the discussion within the context of the artistic, cultural, economic, and political factors that stimulated such passionate interest in 'ancient music.' It also offers a vivid picture of the aesthetic concerns of those musicians and audiences involved with this repertoire, providing insights that help us better understand our own encounters with music of the past.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes:
- Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic
- Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology
- Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry
This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.
Although women writers are historically well-represented in Gothic Fiction, critics of the genre have often stated that there is an essential difference between the Gothic literature produced by men (e.g. Walpole) and that produced by women (e.g. Radcliffe), creating a divide between, respectively, ‘terror’ (female) and ‘horror’ (male) writing. Modern author Susan Hill incorporates much explicit violence (traditionally seen as ‘male’ coding) as well as themes of mother- and fatherhood (traditionally seen as ‘female’ coding), raising the question where she can be situated on this spectrum, what the value of this gender distinction is in today’s increasingly inclusive society and whether her writing follows the historical ‘rule’, possibly debunking the theory altogether. A close reading is conducted of Hill’s 1983 novella The Woman in Black, as well as the background and reception of the Gothic gender division mentioned above. Hill’s work shows that modern writers of Gothic fiction may alternate their use of techniques between the ‘male’ and ‘female’ traditions and their specific ‘Gothic gender’ is hard to determine, if it is still desirable to determine it at all.
This book brings together an analysis of the theoretical connection of genre, reception, and frame theory and a practical demonstration thereof, using a set of parodies of the first wave of the Gothic novel, ranging from well-known titles such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, to little known and researched titles such as Mary Charlton’s Rosella. Münderlein traces the development of socio-political debates conducted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on female roles, behaviour, and subversion from the subtly subversive Gothic novel to the Gothic parody. Combining two major areas of research, literary criticism and Gothic studies, the book provides both a new take on an ongoing debate in literary criticism as well as an in-depth study of a virtually neglected aspect of Gothic studies, the Gothic parody.
Although women writers are historically well-represented in Gothic Fiction, critics of the genre have often stated that there is an essential difference between the Gothic literature produced by men (e.g. Walpole) and that produced by women (e.g. Radcliffe), creating a divide between, respectively, ‘terror’ (female) and ‘horror’ (male) writing. Modern author Susan Hill incorporates much explicit violence (traditionally seen as ‘male’ coding) as well as themes of mother- and fatherhood (traditionally seen as ‘female’ coding), raising the question where she can be situated on this spectrum, what the value of this gender distinction is in today’s increasingly inclusive society and whether her writing follows the historical ‘rule’, possibly debunking the theory altogether. A close reading is conducted of Hill’s 1983 novella The Woman in Black, as well as the background and reception of the Gothic gender division mentioned above. Hill’s work shows that modern writers of Gothic fiction may alternate their use of techniques between the ‘male’ and ‘female’ traditions and their specific ‘Gothic gender’ is hard to determine, if it is still desirable to determine it at all.
The thirty years between the 1972 publication of Rosario Ferré’s short story “La muñeca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s 2003 novella “Relato del piloto que dijo adiós con la mano” span the cultural, political, and economic “shift” from a “regulatory state” to a neoliberal global order that, per Rebekah Sheldon’s analysis, has articulated and contextualized similar contrasting takes on biological and material reproduction. Focusing on their transformed imaginary of “monstrous” reproduction, I explore in this paper how the texts’ Gothic and SF modalizations refract local conditions as well as critical elements of that shift, full of increasingly urgent and extreme consequences in Puerto Rico, and even farther afield.
The importance of history to Victorian culture, and to nineteenth-century Europe more generally, is readily apprehended not only from its historiography, but also from its philosophy, art, literature, science, politics, and public institutions. This dissertation argues that the discourse of aesthetics in Victorian Britain constitutes a major area of historical thinking that, in contrast to the scientific and philosophical historicisms that dominated nineteenth-century European intellectual culture, focuses on individual experience. Its starting point is Walter Pater’s claim that we are born “clothed in a vesture of the past”—that is, that our relation to ourselves is historical and that our relation to history is aesthetic. Through readings of aesthetic theory and art criticism, along with works of historiography, fiction, poetry, and visual art, this dissertation explores some of the ways in which Victorian aesthetics addresses the problem of the relationship between the sensuous representation and experience of the historical, on the one hand, and the subjects of such representation and experience, on the other. Through these readings, aesthetic modes of historical relation such as memory, revival, contrast, haunting, collection, and displacement are addressed as modes of subjectivation. The dissertation considers a wide range of more and less canonical texts by John Ruskin, George Eliot, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Marcus Clarke. While the dissertation focuses on texts written in England, it takes a transnational approach, situating these texts in the broader contexts of the European intellectual discourses with which they engage and of British imperialism, which is addressed in the dissertation’s coda through texts created in colonial Australia. By highlighting the role of the aesthetic in the formation of subjectivity as historical, this dissertation revises the image of nineteenth-century aesthetics as either ahistorical, formulating the pleasures of a timeless subject, or, conversely, deterministic, finding in art merely a reflection of larger historical processes. Instead, aesthetics emerges here as a discourse for the problematization of the historicity of subjectivity.
Nearly two and a half centuries have passed since the first British Gothic novels began to attract attention with their pages full of monstrous characters, excessive violence, explicit sexual content and all kinds of horrific scenes. For the most part, the reception of this type of literature has been very positive, though not exempt from controversies. This paper seeks to show how, beyond the alluring mystery, inventive plots and attraction of the dark side, British horror fiction appeals to the reader’s inner desires and imagination by means of transgressive political, religious or sexual contents that often defy taboos and social decorum. To illustrate this argument, three well-known authors and texts from three different periods will be discussed: Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962).
Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is commonly accepted as the first Gothic novel. This paper addresses the novel's complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship with the political and historical juncture in which it emerged, as well as Walpole's eclectic aesthetic vision which would shape to a great extent the Gothic mode in British literature.
First coming to prominence as an actress and scandalous celebrity, Mary Robinson created an identity for herself as a Romantic poet and novelist in the 1790s. Through a series of literary dialogues with established writers, Robinson put herself at the center of Romantic literary culture as observer, participant, and creator. Cross argues that Robinson’s dialogues shaped the nature of Romantic writing both in content and form and influenced second-generation Romantics. These dialogues further establish the idea of Romantic discourse as essentially interactive and conversational, not the work of original geniuses working in isolation, and positions Robinson as a central player in its genesis.
A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.
This dissertation proposes that there are specific and observable reasons why certain novels have attained the status of, and been commonly called, “cult novels” or “cult fiction”. It also proposes to delineate the development of this process through three major French novels of the twentieth century: André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902), Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954), and Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (1994) as paradigmatic novels of the genre. Since cult fiction covers a wide range of literary “registers”, from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird, a realist novel seemingly aimed at “young readers”, to such emblems of “high” or “experimental literature” as James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, arriving at a contained, direct definition is no simple task. Nevertheless, there are some basic attributes that can help us to arrive at a working definition. Often, but not always, cult fiction originates outside the production of the literary establishment. It is a type of fiction that inspires quasi-religious fervor from its readers – the cultists –, a fervor that is not of the ephemeral or trivial type, but one that grows exponentially over a long period of time, thus an essential component of a particular work of fiction’s “cult” status. The dissertation will therefore be a combination of close textual analysis, as well as a more cultural studies approach that will examine the works in question in their respective historical and cultural contexts.
Resumen
Dentro del espacio irlandés, veremos cómo la sociedad anglicana, atrapada entre elementos nativos irlandeses y la sociedad inglesa, influenció el desarrollo del gótico irlandés. Cuestiones importantes como la paranoia, el temor al Otro y la protección del Yo emergieron bajo una nueva empresa. El paisaje irlandés, el folclore irlandés o las luchas entre protestantes y católicos son elementos que podemos localizar dentro del gótico irlandés. Junto con esto, este estudio se ocupará de aspectos importantes como la desposesión, el abandono y la paranoia, los cuales nacieron dentro de la sociedad angloirlandesa y encontraron su expresión particular en la ficción gótica.
Within the Irish space, we will see how the Anglican society, caught between the native Irish elements and the English society, influenced the development of the Irish Gothic. Important issues such as paranoia, the fear to the Other and the protection of the Self emerged under a new manufacture. The Irish landscape, the Irish folklore and the struggles between Protestants and Catholics are elements located within the Irish Gothic. Together with this, this study will concern itself with an analysis of important elements such as dispossession, abandonment and paranoia, they were born in the Anglo-Irish society and found its particular expression in the Gothic fiction.
It has long been recognized that the German balladeer G. A. Burger substantially affected the development of Romantic ballad-poetry in Britain. When introduced in 1796, Burger’s supernatural tales immediately struck a chord with English and Scottish readers. In a letter from that year, Anna Seward reports how high and low readers alike felt that their minds were ‘grappled’ by Burger’s ‘Lenore’.1 In a contemporary letter to Coleridge, Charles Lamb must resort to a hieroglyphic code when trying to communicate the tumultuous sensations he has received during his reading of Bürger: ‘Have you read the ballad called “Leonora”, in the second number of the “Monthly Magazine”? If you have !!!!!!!!!!!!!’2 And writing many years after Burger’s English debut, in 1830, Walter Scott still remembers how the ‘fanciful wildness’ of Bürger’s ‘celebrated ballad of “Lenoré”’ [sic] ‘electrified’ its readers to such an extent that it seemed to inaugurate a new era in poetry.3 Scott, in turn, began his career by translating Bürger’s poems, and many other hopeful writers imitated them.
Overview: contexts of Romanticism and the challenge of “theory” To speak of the “challenge of theory” in the context of Romanticism and, more specifically, in the context of teaching Romanticism is to raise a problem and call forth a justification: why would one endeavour to teach undergraduate Romanticism “theoretically”? Students at this level invariably find literary theory demanding. They also find Romanticism — of all of the “period” courses that they encounter on our degree — challenging, not least because the concept is so difficult to pin down. To combine elements of literary theory with an introduction to Romanticism in a compulsory first-year module delivered to over one hundred students in twelve weeks would seem to be asking for trouble logistically and pedagogically. Moreover, it raises difficulties that pertain to the very project of theorizing Romanticism. There remains some hostility within the arts and humanities towards “theory” and this is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Romantic studies; as David Simpson puts it, “theory is one of those terms that has caused arguments in seminars and tantrums at dinner parties” and he goes on to highlight the relationship of “various constructions of Romanticism” to the persistence of this aversion within the Anglo-American academy (Simpson 1993: 1, 2).
The Gothic Art of Mechanical ReproductionRadcliffe 's Public Transport SystemSlowing Down to Read the Signs: Radcliffe 's Dreadful HieroglyphicsAcceleration and Narrative CurvesReferences and further reading
Literary AestheticsState AestheticsCelebrity Aesthetics and DancingReferences and Further Reading
Die gothic novel ist eine Gattung, die seit Beginn der 1980er Jahre eingehend von der Forschung untersucht wird. All diese Monographien und Aufsätze zur Gattung haben jedoch nur eine recht begrenzte Leserschaft. Eine deutlich größere Leserschaft bezieht ihr Bild der Gattung aus Geschichten der englischen Literatur, die wegen ihres Überblicks- und Einführungscharakters beliebt sind. Vorliegende Arbeit untersucht diese Literaturgeschichten und ihr breitenwirksames Bild (bzw. Bilder) der Gattung - dabei werden jedoch auch Literaturgeschichten aus der Zeit vor 1980 beachtet (genauer: seit ca. 1850), waren sie doch stets einflussreich.
Betrachtet werden verschiedenste Aspekte der Gattungsdarstellung: Gattungsbe-zeichnungen, das Gattungskorpus, die der Gattung zugewiesenen Merkmale, narrative oder literaturhistoriographische Möglichkeiten der Gattungskonstruktion, die Bewertung der Gattung, die literaturgeschichtliche Kontextualisierung der Gattung, die Behandlung wichtiger Themen der Gattungsforschung. Hierbei werden hauptsächlich englische Literaturgeschichten aus Großbritannien untersucht. Ausschließlich in einem letzten Kapitel werden zum Vergleich englische Literaturgeschichten aus den USA und aus Deutschland betrachtet.
Bei den Gattungsbezeichnungen zeigt sich, dass bis in die 1960er Jahre der Begriff Terror dominiert, danach der Begriff gothic. Beim Gattungskorpus orientieren sich Literaturgeschichten an literaturhistoriographischen Vorgängerwerken. Daher werden trotz der vielen gothic novelists (des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts, auf die sich die Arbeit beschränkt) meist dieselben wenigen thematisiert. Die dominierenden Merkmale der Gattung sind Terror, Übernatürlichkeit und Mittelalterbezug. Da die Gattung über die Merkmale oft nur schemenhaft etabliert wird, postulieren manche Literaturgeschichten ein Imitationsverhältnis zwischen dem Gattungsbegründer Horace Walpole und späteren gothic novelists und produzieren erst so eine (übertrieben) homogene und scharf abgegrenzte Gattung. Bei der Bewertung der Gattung zeigt sich eine starke Aufwertung der Gattung im 20. Jahrhundert, insofern als sie wesentlich intensiver besprochen wird als im 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Wandel von ästhetischen Negativ- zu ästhetischen Positivwertungen findet jedoch nicht statt. Die Kontextualisierung der Gattung geschieht vor allem über den Epochenkontext der Romantik und über den Gattungskontext der novel. Bei ersterem zeigt sich, dass die Gattung in neueren Literaturgeschichten nicht mehr wie zuvor als defizitärer Vertreter der Romantik betrachtet wird. Bei letzterem zeigt sich die Gattung häufig als innovatives Moment in der Geschichte der novel. Drei Perspektiven auf die Gattung, die in der Gattungsforschung häufig auftreten, sind: die historische, die psychologische und die feministische oder gender-theoretisch inspirierte. Für die historische Perspektive lässt sich in der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung feststellen, dass nostalgische und eskapistische Deutungen der Gattung häufiger auftreten als vergangenheitskritische. Psychologische Deutungen der Gattung sind in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts detaillierter und vielfältiger geworden. Feministische und gender-theoretisch inspirierte Ansätze finden in den letzten Jahrzehnten langsam und ansatzweise Eingang in die Literaturgeschichten. Der Vergleich der englischen Literaturgeschichten aus Großbritannien mit denen aus den USA und aus Deutschland fördert wesentliche Übereinstimmungen (z.B. beim Gattungskorpus und bei den Gattungsmerkmalen) wie wesentliche Differenzen zutage (z.B. geringere Aufwertung der Gattung in den USA und verspätete in Deutschland).
TESIS DOCTORADO EN HUMANIDADES UNIVERSIDAD DE SONORA
“Bells and Spells” suggests that the feature of repetition, so often linked in a deprecating way with Gothic, is shared by Romanticism. The article explores the frequent apparition of repetition in typically “high” Romantic texts and shows how repetition tends to render impotent the language of transcendence usually associated with Romanticism. Readings of Novalis, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe indicate the point of default at which repetition causes the language of unification to falter. The language of love fails to fuse its interlocutors in Novalis and instead devolves into an almost inane redundancy, while the proximity of Gothic and Romanticism in Byron's Manfred shows the dependence of the invocative power of language on the “other.” The figure of tolling bell in Keats, Poe, and Shelley shows the movement back and forth between repetition and redundancy, a movement through which language is pushed to its limits but falls back into the metonymy of syntax and finitude that it would transcend.
The question of the Gothic's use of and attitude toward Roman Catholicism has been increasingly contentious in recent years, with literary historians claiming that its prominence as a thematic concern provides a test case for distinguishing whether or not the Gothic should be understood as an ideology or as an aesthetic mode not primarily invested in ideological issues at all. By examining this critical issue, I argue for an understanding of the Gothic as primarily a form of propagandistic fiction invested in nationalistic Whig and Protestant ideologies. The article also builds on the recent biographical and critical work done on two British novelists who both specialized in writing anti-Catholic gothic novels during the heyday of the genre and, not coincidentally, the popular agitation against the Catholic emancipation movement. William-Henry Ireland's two most well-known gothic novels, The Abbess (1799) and Gondez the Monk (1807), as well as Thomas Isaac Horsley Curties's novel The Monk of Udolpho (1807) are placed in a wider historical, religious, and cultural context in order to analyze the persistent use and meaning of Catholic themes in the gothic genre. Figure 1. From Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk (London: Purkess, 1848). Reproduced courtesy of Justin Gilbert.
Like her women Romantic contemporaries Joanna Baillie and Anna Barbauld, the Scottish poet Anne Bannerman (1765–1829) took an interest in the imaginative possibilities conferred by the tradition of British visionary poetics, a longstanding mode of imaginative production engaged by authors such as Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and many of the canonical Romantics, including William Blake, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Evoking the style, conventions and disruptive objectives of Judeo‐Christian scriptural prophecy, visionary poetics created an opportunity for authors to express unpopular and even radical ideas within culturally sanctioned literary frameworks such as dream narratives, portrayals of seers and imaginative accounts of mystical or otherworldly experiences. In her second published volume of poetry, 1802's Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, Bannerman makes use of several themes, images and tropes associated with visionary poetry in what appears at first glance to be a volume of Gothic ballads. That pieces such as ‘The Prophetess of the Oracle of Seäm’ and ‘The Prophecy of Merlin’ place her Tales within the context of vatic literature becomes more compelling when we consider how Bannerman redraws certain conventions of the visionary subgenre and so transforms the Gothic idiom.
In the works and letters of his later years, Wilkie Collins continually expressed his displeasure over copyright violations. Wilkie Collins and Copyright: Artistic Ownership in the Age of the Borderless Word by Sundeep Bisla asks whether that discontent might not also have affected the composition of Collins’s major early works of the 1850s and 60s. Bisla’s investigation into this question, surprisingly, does not find an uncomplicated author uncomplicatedly launched on a defense of what he believes to be rightfully his. Instead, Bisla finds an author locked in fierce negotiation with the theoretical underpinnings of his medium, the written word, underpinnings best delineated by the twentieth-century deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Collins’s discomfort with copyright violation comes to be in tension with his budding understanding of the paradoxical nature of the “iterability” of the word, a nature presenting itself as a conflict between the settling and breaking manifestations of linguistic repetition. In his efforts at resolving this paradox, Collins adopts a mechanism of recursive self-reflexivity through which each story reflects upon itself to a more fundamental extent than had its predecessor. This self-reflexive exploration has significant consequences for the author’s own iterability-menaced subjectivity, a striking example of which can be seen in the fact that the name being sought in Collins’s last masterpiece, The Moonstone, will end up being “MY OWN NAME” — in other words, “WILKIE COLLINS.”
Towards a Poetics of Becoming: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and John Keats's Aesthetics Between Idealism and Deconstruction" grapples with a new aspect in reading and interpreting Romantic textuality, evident in both writers. Resisting the radical presuppositions of current idealist critical readings on the one hand, and modern and postmodern critical approaches that sideline Romantic aesthetic and spiritual idealism and dismiss Romantic theory as a whole respectively, the work sets forth to re-evaluate Romantic idealism from within the interpretative context of the philosophy of becoming. In this vein, it argues that a majority of the texts of Coleridge and Keats strongly substantiate their long sustained idealism, through a permanent process of transformation and changes in the developing self towards a desired goal.
The centrality of the poetics of becoming, the work conjectures, is understood from a reformulation of Schlegel's Romantic theory on irony and becoming, and Hegel's idealistic dialectics, which argue for the non-progressive contradictory self and the spiral attainment of absolute knowledge respectively. The hermeneutic and phenomenological understanding of logical and constructive irony, paradox, fragmentation, self-contradiction, anti-self-consciousness and constructive deferral, do not only place the texts treated as dynamic and highly interrelated with other texts, but most importantly the developing and transforming self of the writers, positing the argument that the question of self-presence and intentionality is tenable in the process of becoming.
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