Contesting the Gothic : fiction, genre, and cultural conflict, 1764-1832
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Contesting the Gothic : fiction, genre, and cultural conflict, 1764-1832
（Cambridge studies in romanticism, 33）
Cambridge University Press, 2006, c1999
- : pbk
Available at 3 libraries
Note
Rev. version of the author's thesis (Ph.D.) -- Cambridge University
Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-200) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
James Watt's historically grounded account of Gothic fiction, first published in 1999, 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 various writers or works. Central to his argument about these works' writing and reception is a nuanced understanding of their political import: Walpole's attempt to forge an aristocratic identity, the loyalist affiliations of many neglected works of the 1790s, a reconsideration of the subversive reputation of The Monk, and the ways in which Radcliffean romance proved congenial to conservative critics. Watt concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and examines the process by which the Gothic came to be defined as a monolithic tradition, in a way that continues to exert a powerful hold.
Table of Contents
- 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.
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