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316ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Elizabeth MacAndrew. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. 289p. Elizabeth MacAndrew's The Gothic Tradition in Fiction may be taken as a response to the desire many students of Gothic fiction must feel fora synthesis that knits together crucial insights from the burgeoning scholarship on the subject so as to define a continuous line of development or recurrence of form from the classic Gothic novels of 1764-1820, through the nineteenth-century, to present-day works. MacAndrew devotes about half her book to the classic period, about half to the "Continuing Tradition" in the nineteenth-century, and an admittedly brief epilogue to such writers as Kafka.Flannery O'Connor, and Ann Rice. MacAndrew defines Gothic as fiction that focuses on "the place of evil in the human mind" and uses symbolic plot, setting, and characters (especially "doubles"), and "mediated" narration (such as the edited, ancient MS) to do so (see esp. p. 3). Her historical thesis is that the symbolic method shifts with the passage of time from implicit to "specific" (p. 52) until writers such as Robert L. Stevenson and Henry James reach a complete consciousness of their pshychological aim and symbolic method (p. 223) and that the concept of evil displayed in Gothic shifts from the absolute, Benevolist distinction in eighteenth-century works such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) to "relative" viewpoints which culminate in James's Turn of the Screw (1898) (pp. 4, 7). The chapters on classic Gothic cover mostly familiar ground and are, if one accepts MacAndrew's definition of Gothic, in general tenable except for some debatable interpretations of specific works. Subsequent chapters, devoted to the "Continuing Tradition," argue that the devices of classic Gothic continue to be used but in ways which suggest that moral evil is relative or ambiguous. The evidence here is very patchy, however, and sometimes strained, and a notable flaw in the argument is its neglect of the fact that, by 1814, Hoffman and, by 1832, Poe, both of whose uses of mad narrators and of doubles are discussed, were conscious of "mapping the topography of the dreaming mind" (p. 151) and of using those devices to do so long before what MacAndrew calls the "arrival at consciousness" of aim and method by Stevenson and James (p. 223). MacAndrew's definition of her fundamental term, Gothic, is questionable because it may exclude much literature that has been traditionally called Gothic and includes some — tales by Hoffmann, for example — which is weird but not inevitably thought of as Gothic. In defining the term by reference to moral evil as the necessary theme of a Gothic work, she neglects Robert Hume's stipulation that Gothic is characterized by an "atmosphere of . . . brooding terror" (PMLA,84 1969, p. 286). It has a characteristic plot in which the reader and usually a central character with whom he sympathizes expect something terrible to happen to the character. The definition also raises the question of whether the plot, setting, and characters need be psychologically symbolic. MacAndrew's insistence upon psychological symbolism derives ultimately, I think, from Leslie Fiedler's comments on "projective" characterization in traditionally Gothic works in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). The Gothic Tradition in Fiction is a reminder that the synthesis for which Gothicists yearn must be based both on careful attention to the texts traditionally called Gothic and on a thorough rethinking of the critical controversies flowing from Fiedler's book, abetted by Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and from the Hume-Platzner debate in PMLA in 1969 and 1971. ALAN JOHNSON Arizona State University ...

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