Rise of the gothic

Anne Williams says in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic that “A thoughtful analysis of ‘Gothic’ should challenge the kind of literary history that organizes, delineates, and defines: a literary history that also confines us within some inherited literary concepts, particularly ideas about genre, that can be as confusing as Udolpho’s amazing structures” (p. 13). While this remark lays the groundwork for her own approach, one which insists on Gothic as a “poetics” with a Male and Female lineage rewritten by the Romantic poets, it is also a guide to the approach of the best work currently being done on the Gothic, work that is less interested in defining and limiting the Gothic than in revealing its emergence from a rich stew of eighteenth-century political and cultural conditions. Each text considered here holds a different facet of the Gothic to the light and successfully exposes new truths about this genre-that-is-not-a-genre. It is Williams, again, who notes that the “omnipresence and imprecision” of the term, as in attempts to define “obscenity,” eludes every attempt to reduce it to a textbook definition (p. 14). Readers seeking a definition of the Gothic must look elsewhere; these works extend, rather than limit, the purview of the Gothic and give new depth to our understanding of one of its central figures, Ann Radcliffe. The explosion of interest in the Gothic which dates from Robert Kiely’s now twenty-five-year-old The Romantic Novel in England shows no sign of abating; the seven works under consideration here are an indication that the field is still robust and the momentum of accelerating interest is carrying these important debates beyond the period and genre narrowly defined by The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and into instructive apposition with Romanticism, late eighteenth-century consumerism, and even Postmodern criticism with its insistent digging for dead and buried secrets.

Early twentieth-century critics of the Gothic, such as Eino Railo and J. M. S. Tompkins ¹ adopted an apologetic tone or sought to excuse the inclusion of the popular, not to say, vulgar, Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by insisting on the importance of the Gothic to Romanticism, as if the Gothic could be elevated by the association. Montague Summers felt no need to apologize; his idiosyncratic approach to the Gothic presented it to a public exhorted to value the novels precisely for their oddity and frivolity, their very uselessness. ² From the 1950s onward, Devendra Varma’s influence was felt not only in historical criticism that traced the Gothic’s predecessors in greater detail than before and linked its value to its influence on Romanticism, ³ but also in his stewardship of the invaluable Arno reprint series of Gothic novels and criticism. Kiely’s work, though hardly apologetic in tone, subsumed the Gothic within the categories preromantic and romantic, a tactic that now seems unnecessarily constraining. As they trace the Gothic from the romance to the Romantics, all of these writers might be said to have kept alive the claims of Horace Walpole himself that he based...