Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764–1834 by Ellen Malenas Ledoux, and: Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 by Siân Silyn Roberts, and: Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution by Matthew Garret (review)

Recent years have seen an explosion in gothic studies, especially in relation to political and social issues. Long mired in psychoanalytical approaches and a reductive focus on its emotional effects, the gothic has become a productive site of investigation into ideology, subjectivity, and political aesthetics. Much of this scholarly work has concentrated on its early period, especially the tumultuous decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, when the gothic became one of the most important literary forms on both sides of the Atlantic. Two recent studies, Ellen Malenas Ledoux’s Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764–1834 (2013) and Siân Silyn Roberts’s Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 (2014) explicitly address the relationship of the gothic genre (or mode, as it is increasingly defined) to social and political debates of the period. A third book, Matthew Garret’s Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution (2014), examines nearly the same corpus but from a slightly different angle, attending to the sub-generic feature of the “episode.” Bringing this often overlooked narrative unit to the forefront allows Garrett to examine works from the early American Republic, not only revealing unexpected connections and resonances but also shedding light on formal aspects of Early Republic literature—such as the loose and seemingly rambling plots of Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels—that have long puzzled readers. Although Roberts focuses on fiction, Ledoux on a variety of genres, and Garrett on the episode, all three studies deal with, specifically, the interaction between literary form and politics. And all three give Brown a key place in Anglo-American literary culture of this period, since this question was at the heart of Brown’s work.

In the background to all three studies we can perceive the recent growth of transatlantic approaches to literary production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though two (Roberts and Garrett) deliberately choose to focus mainly on the literary culture of the United States, and in particular on the decades immediately following the ratification of the Constitution. The reason for this is linked to the heightened interest in subjectivity in recent years—both Roberts and Garrett are interested in the way literary form helps shape political subjects, and both find the early decades of the Young Republic unique in terms of the social and political conditions they represented. Thus, although neither the gothic nor the episode were original forms emerging from the American context—both were imports with important genealogies (one several decades old and one quite ancient)—Roberts and Garrett argue, respectively, that the gothic and the episode were adapted in significant ways to the culture of this charged moment and participated actively in the production of new ways of thinking about community and political union. Garrett’s approach proves slightly more intriguing and formalist, arguing that the relationship of the episode to the larger narrative encapsulated the tension of the part to the whole that represented the heart of the political question of the young nation. Through the way they managed to constitute a whole of loosely connected parts, Garrett argues, the episodic plots of many Early Republic texts performed a kind of politics—one of consolidation and compromise. Episodic structure represents both the staging and the containment of a certain kind...