History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824 (review)

Gothic Literature, 1764-1824 integrates a timely and well-researched introductory overview of British Gothic literature in its earliest phase with a clarifying examination of the often dismissive critical reception-history of the Gothic canon. One of the most recognizable features of this study includes a streamlined reconception of the contested category of the "female Gothic." Davison offers her book, the first in a four-volume series commissioned as "A History of the Gothic," as a "springboard into Gothic Studies" and a practical and engaging resource for "the novice and specialist alike" (21). She sup ports this pragmatic agenda with an extensive and accessible set of notes, supplementary materials, and appendices. While Davison focuses largely on the novel and the usual hit list of Gothic authors, she also takes her reader into less familiar terrain. The real strength of this book lies less in its readerly utility, accessibility, and scope than in the way it weaves together various strands into a coherent argument about the generic identity, aesthetic and political vitality, and historical trajectory of the Gothic tradition without sacrificing the unique and convergent interests of the specific texts it examines.

Driven by a sensitivity to anachronism and a desire to disambiguate overwrought categories and debates, Davison's main goal is to contextualize her subject as a corrective to a number of "longstanding anti-Gothic biases" and the equally "dehistoricizing" effects of some theoretically "heavy-handed" trends in current scholarship (3, 11, 12). Davison argues persuasively that the modern impulse to privilege contemporary theory produces a kind of historical myopia or theoretical narcissism whereby critics lose sight of the singular peculiarities of text and context in the process. Her first chapter asks "why, in the so-called Age of Reason, was there a seemingly insatiable appetite for the irrational, in the form of the Gothic novel," which "focused its lens on a past seemingly far removed from eighteenth-century realities?" (24). In support of the claim that the Gothic emerges as a natural and predictable "response to the trauma of modernity," Davison firmly embeds the Gothic in its cultural, intellectual, and political context as a revolutionary mode of critical historical consciousness (51).

The second chapter explores the many sources that converge in Horace Walpole's ur-Gothic text The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the elemental and thematic ingredients that cohere in his paradigmatic Gothic "recipe." In response to scholars who have recently defined the Gothic less as a tradition with a clearly defined generic identity than as a contentious domain structured by authorial antagonisms, Davison—in a self-consciously provocative, if theoretically uncanny, move—overtly embraces a structuralist anatomy and suggests a progressive history of dialogue in order to validate the Gothic's generic integrity and the continuity of its development. She concludes with a brief account of Clara Reeve's middle-class corrective appropriation of Walpole's recipe in The Old English Baron, which Davison sees as an important and "necessary bridge" to the monumental works of Ann Radcliffe, the textual focus of the following chapter (81).

In chapter 3, Davison sets out to redefine and revitalize the vexed category of the "Female Gothic," a "sub-genre" or "branch of Gothic fiction": "perhaps the most useful and uncontroversial definition of this classification would be limited to its narrative focus—namely, on a female, as opposed to a male, protagonist" (91). Though characterizing the foundational efforts of authors such as Ann Radcliffe as representing a "branch" or "sub-genre" of Gothic fiction seems to belie their centrality, Davison's open-handed reconception of the term serves nicely to con textualize female concerns within the Gothic tradition. Davison argues that, despite recent claims about her meek and conservative position, Radcliffe sparked a "proto-feminist/middle-class cultural 'revolution'" (86, 99).

Continuing in this vein, chapter 4 examines the Gothic's efflorescence during the French Revolution and its suitability, and more radical appropriation, for domestic socio-political...