Blackwell Reference Online

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I perceive you have no idea what Gothic is; you have lived too long amidst true taste, to understand venerable barbarism.(Horace Walpole, letter to Mann, 1753)Critical and historical studies of Gothic fiction have long laboured under a curse. The derisive laughter with which William Wordsworth greeted the romances of Ann Radcliffe has echoed down the ages, to the discomfort of most scholars of Gothic studies, who have been obliged either to accept the scornful verdict of criticism upon the deficiencies of Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin and their followers, or to devise special strategies to annul its malediction. Until the 1930s, most accounts of Gothic fiction were modestly content to admit that the Gothic was an undistinguished curiosity of literary evolution, which nonetheless merited some scholarly treatment of its sources, influences, biographical contexts and generic features. Since that time, however, shamefaced antiquarianism has given way to defiance, as the Gothic literary tradition has attracted to it partisans and champions who have advanced ever bolder claims for its value, attempting to cast upon it the reflected glories of literary romanticism and of the political traditions of the French Revolution. This modern phase of Gothic studies we have designated, for reasons that will emerge later, the phase of ‘Gothic Criticism’. This chapter does not attempt a full ... log in or subscribe to read full text