Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression ed. by Kenneth W. Graham (review)

HUMANITIES 121 movement from history to inner spirit and timelessness through Christ, as the speaker associates more with Christ than with David or his own inner sinful self. Other poems show Parnell writing elegies, epigrams, lyrics, occasional pieces, meditations, psalms, and satires. Several of the satires demand attention, though the shade of Pope has little to fear. The extensive and helpful commentary and endnotes are difficult to use because the publisher wrongly excluded page numbers in running heads to guide the reader. The dense and valuable Introduction lacks a 'Life' and an estimate of Parnell's place in eighteenth-century poetry, an estimate now made easier. At least two judgments already want reconsideration: Bonamy Dobree's views that Pamell'found his happiest expression in the loose octosyllablic couplet,' and that 'his most famous piece, "A Night Piece on Death" ... may have initiated the phase of graveyard verse' (English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740, 1959). The conventional but engaging heroic couplets of 'On Queen Anne's Peace. Anno 1713' are at least as 'happy' as the octosyllabics; and the 'Night Piece' is so small a part of Parnell's output that modem anthologists have overrated its importance. A little Parnell still goes a long way, but thanks to Rawson and Lock we are better able to determine how far we might go with him. (HOWARD D. WEINBROT) Kenneth W. Graham, editor. Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression AMS Press. xvii, 292 This volume, which had its origin in a seminar at the 1g85 conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, is an anthology of thirteen critical essays dealing with various aspects of the Gothic novel. The essays are organized according to certain categories: the four 'General Studies' focus broadly on the origins of the genre and on the motifs of the locked room and the mad scientist; in the section titled 'The Woman's Text' three studies assess the significance of Ann Radcliffe; and the 'Specific Studies' consider individual works that are Gothic in themselves, like The Mysteries of Udolpho, or strongly influenced by the Gothic, like Caleb Williams, Shelley's The Cenci, and the juvenilia of the Brontes. Contributors include, among others, scholars well versed in the Gothic: David Punter, James Reaney, Bette B. Roberts, and Jay Macpherson . Eight of the thirteen come from scholars at Canadian universities. Is it, as editor Kenneth W. Graham has suggested elsewhere, the influence of Margaret Atwood and our long cold winters? Or is it that Canadians, like long-suffering Radcliffe heroines, have been educated only too well by their own political governors in the ways of terror and horror? Its editor says that Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression represents 122 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 'some of the most recent thinking being done' on the subject. It also reveals much about the current state of criticism, Gothic or otherwise. In some essays, the reader will find such fashionable postmodern totems as indeterminacy and intertextuality, as well as the all-purpose use of the word'discourse.' The title evokes Roland Barthes, whose thought colours several of the essays; in fact Barthes is cited at such length by some critics as to qualify as an honorary Gothicist. The oblique stroke in the title, an allusion to Barthes's S/Z, indicates 'an ambiguity of relationship between prohibition and transgression,' and the collection as a whole focuses on this relationship 'to underline the fundamental subversiveness of the Gothic experience.' This is all very well, but it is hardly news in Gothic studies. The use of Barthes seems more cosmetic than enlightening, simply offering a contemporary way to present fairly familiar conclusions . Some of the approaches taken here create a sense of looking down the wrong end of a telescope in that much thought and some hefty critical apparatus (structuralism, psychoanalytic theory) have been trained on points that ultimately seem minor or commonplace. In these pieces, the marshalling of critical methodology seems the whole idea of the exercise, rather than the illumination of a particular text. The revealing clue lies in the fact that the Gothic writer ostensibly under scrutiny is mentioned so little in relation to the array of theory. It is disappointing that many...