Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The rapid increase in the production of Gothic fiction in the 1790s and beyond is one of the more remarkable but also one of the less well understood phenomena of the British Romantic period. Before this, only a handful of novels in the genre had been produced, and readers and critics paid them little attention. Yet from 1800 onwards some 20–30 titles a year were being published, and the influence of the genre is readily apparent in the literary journals and in the writings of the Romantic poets. It is also an influence that persists long after its immediate efflorescence is over in the 1820s, extending into canonical works by authors such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Brontes and Henry James. This sudden rise of the Gothic is only the first of several intriguing issues involved in studying this genre.A second question can be raised about the meaning of the term ‘Gothic’. The term appears at the outset of the history of the genre, as part of the subtitle of the second edition (1765) of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, generally considered the first novel in the genre. While several features of this novel, such as the castle and the Gothic villain, recur frequently in later fictions considered Gothic (by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis), they are absent from other key texts considered to belong to the genre (Shelley's Frankenstein or Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions ... log in or subscribe to read full text