The Gothic Text (review)

With The Gothic Text, Marshall Brown continues the provocative project (begun in his 1991 study Preromanticism) of rereading literary history teleologically, though Brown's concept of telos is emphatically not a single point of arrival from which final judgments of value can be made, but rather a vector of thought aiming uncertainly into the future. Conjoining text and time in this fashion exposes unseen relationships between texts, and it is Brown's insistence on this perspective that makes The Gothic Text so rewarding and suggestive.

At the heart of this study lies the bold proposition that "Kant and the gothic together discovered a new dimension of human consciousness," namely the confrontation with reality-as-unknowable (ix). This epistemological and psychological shift forced a split between phenomena and the thing-in-itself and thus opened the realm of the transcendental, at once governed by unseen laws and haunted by undisclosed monstrosities. The consequences of that split come to fruition in the work of Freud; indeed, part of Brown's insight is that the form of the gothic itself anticipates his own extremely Lacanian lens.

The first two parts of Brown's book place the first gothic text, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, in extended dialog with Kantian philosophy. The insights gathered from that intertext are neatly threaded through the attendant chapters in the book's third and fourth sections, culminating in rereadings of Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. However, even if the body of his text begins and ends with English writers, Brown insists on the international character of the gothic and draws on French, German, and Russian examples, strengthening his claim that gothic literature helps to inaugurate a significant change in Western thought. As if to underscore this continental scale, The Gothic Text ends with a postscript, co-written with Jane K. Brown, in which Goethe's Faust is engagingly read as both the culmination of the gothic impulse and the mark of its circumscription. Throughout, in accessible and warm prose, Brown offers readings that challenge us to take the gothic seriously and to read philosophy imaginatively.