Gothic Origins: New Primary Scholarship

Gothic Origins: New Primary Scholarship Michael Gamer Scholarship on the Gothic has flourished for over two decades— in part because of the Gothic's ability to move across generic, historical , and national divides; in part because of its relentless gendering that has made it a central area of inquiry for feminist criticism; and in part because of the uneasy position it has occupied between high and popular culture. Its generic instability has made the Gothic a kind of ultimate test for any critic working on genre, while its famously sensational content has attracted excellent work across a range of critical approaches.Judging from these four recent publications on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Gothic writing,1 the wealth of secondary criticism published since David Punter's The Literature of Terror (1980) and Eve Sedgwick's The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980) is now producing an analogous boom in primary materials—anthologies, editions, biographies, and sourcebooks . The most exciting ofthese offer penetrating reassessments of major figures and genuinely expand our sense ofthe Gothic's origins and canon. Given the popularity and lasting appeal of Gothic fiction, it is surprising how little of it was readily available as late as the 1970s. Even 1 Rictor Norton, ed., Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000. xiii + 369pp. US$99.95 (cloth); US$29.95 (paper). ISBN 07185 -0217-5. Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700-1820. Ed. EJ. Clery and Robert Miles. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. ix + 306pp. US$69.95 (cloth); US$24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7190-4027-2. D.L. Macdonald. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2000. xv+ 311pp. US$60.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8020-4749-1. William Godwin, Caleb Williams. Ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley. Peterborough , Ont: Broadview Press, 2000. 573pp. US$12.95; CDN$15.95. ISBN 1-55111249 -3. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 2,January 2002 216EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION this small trickle of novels was largely the result of the dedication of scholars such as Eino Railo, Montagu Summers, and Devendrá Varma, whose work can be said to have done for Gothic Studies what W.S. Lewis did for the cultural standing of Horace Walpole. With the exception of specialists interested in archival research, the fiction of writers as important as Charlotte Dacre, William Henry Ireland, Sophia Lee, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith was until recently largely ignored. Add to this a startling lack of recent or even sympathetic biographies, not to mention a dearth of resources available on Gothic writing other than a few representative novels, and we begin to appreciate the determination of cultural historians to enhance the Gothic's reputation and to make materials available. Teaching the Gothic has long meant compiling thick coursepacks of photocopied material, often accumulated at considerable cost and with assiduous cajoling of rare-book librarians. In the case of Gothic short fiction or poetry, transcription is often a last resort, and a number ofscholars have found the internet a welcome means of making such materials accessible to other scholars. For those of us teaching the Gothic at the secondary or the university level, the recent anthologies edited by Rictor Norton and by EJ. Clery and Robert Miles will prove welcome. I will begin with Norton, whose introduction provides a succinct account of his reasons for compiling and publishing the collection: In this selection of readings I have endeavoured to provide representative samples of the major Gothic genres (Historical Gothic, the Radcliffe School of Terror, the Lewis or "German" School of Horror, tragic melodrama, comic parody, chapbooks, supernatural poetry and ballads, literary criticism and theory , book reviews and polemic) , supplemented by private letters and diaries, and contemporary anecdotes about dramatic performances and the design of theatre sets. My major aim has been to establish the literary-cultural context of the Gothic.2 Norton's primary aim in Gothic Readings is coverage, and each of his categories corresponds to a section ofreadings in the collection. The collection aims to appeal to readers and students wishing to gain an understanding of the Gothic by reading a single volume. Surveying all Gothic writing...