Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832

ISBN-13: 9780521640992 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 220 str.

James Watt

Opis

This historically grounded account of Gothic fiction takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterized at times by antagonistic relations between writers or works. Watt examines the novels' political import and concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and perceptions of the Gothic as a monolithic tradition, which continue to exert a powerful hold.

Recenzje

"The exposition is lucid, the reasoning scrupulous, the tone measured and never polemical. The book can be recommended to anyone as the model of a focused and thoroughly professional investigation that carves out a niche of originality in a very crowded literary shelf." Eighteenth-Century Studies

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto; 2. The Loyalist Gothic romance; 3. Gothic 'subversion': German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis; 4. The first poetess of Romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe; 5. The field of Romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic; Notes; Bibliography; Index.