Love, mystery, and misery : feeling in Gothic fiction
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Love, mystery, and misery : feeling in Gothic fiction
Athlone, 1995
Paperback ed
- pbk
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Note
Selective list of Gothic novels: p. [189]-190
Bibliography: p. ix-x
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction in England. Dr. Howells proposes a radical reassessment of these novels to emphasize their importance as experiments in imaginative writing. Her object, the study of feeling, is central to Gothic, for its spell consists in the feelings it arouses and exercises. As pseudo-historical fantasy, Gothic fiction embodies contemporary neuroses, especially sexual fears and repressions, which run right through it and are basic to its conventions. This study traces the effort to articulate these disconcerting emotions in symbol, incident, landscape and architecture. The chronological design suggests developments in Gothic, from the initial explorations of Mrs Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, through the Minerva Press novelists and Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey", to new directions taken by C.R. Maturin in "Melmoth the Wanderer" and later by Charlotte Bronte whose "Jane Eyre", arguably the finest of Gothic novels, places the earlier experiments in perspective.
Table of Contents
- Introduction - gothic themes, values, techniques
- "The Mysteries of Udolpho", Ann Radcliffe
- "The Monk", M.G. Lewis
- Minerva Press Fiction, 1796-1819 - "The Children of the Abbey", Regina Maria Roche, and "Manfrone, or the One-Handed Monk", Mary-Ann Radcliffe
- "Melmoth the Wanderer", C.R. Maturin
- "Jane Eyre", Charlotte Bronte
- selective list of gothic novels
- novels.
by "Nielsen BookData"