Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820 : the import of terror

Bibliographic Information

Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820 : the import of terror

Angela Wright

(Cambridge studies in romanticism, 99)

Cambridge University Press, 2013

  • : hardback

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-211) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continuing connections between Gothic literature and France through the realms of translation, adaptation and unacknowledged borrowing led to strong suspicions of Gothic literature taking on a subversive role in diminishing British patriotism. Angela Wright explores the development of Gothic literature in Britain in the context of the fraught relationship between Britain and France, offering fresh perspectives on the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis and their contemporaries.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • 1. The mysterious author Horace Walpole
  • 2. The translator cloak'd: Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith
  • 3. Versions of Gothic and terror
  • 4. The castle under threat: Ann Radcliffe's system and the romance of Europe
  • 5. 'The order disorder'd': French convents and British liberty
  • Conclusion: afterlives
  • Works cited.

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