Abstract

Abstract:

The Gothic played a considerable role in America's early literary nationalist campaign. At the forefront of this movement was the writer and social activist John Neal (1793–1876), who often used the prefaces to his Gothic novels to promote a literary nationalist agenda. Despite his censure of the tendency among his fellow American writers to import traditional British Gothic machinery into their fiction in the preface to his Gothic novel, The Down-Easters (1832), however, elements of this machinery are repeatedly discernible in Neal's own Gothic novels Logan (1823) and Randolph (1824). This article seeks to account for this discrepancy by proposing that the apparently counterintuitive slippage between the British and American Gothic traditions in Neal's writing performs a satirical function. Read in light of the preface to The Down-Easters, as well as the metafictional literary nationalist current which runs throughout much of Neal's corpus, the inclusion of a hackneyed British Gothic subplot in Logan's second volume and the jarring feudalization of Baltimore's architecture in Randolph emerge as a biting reductio ad absurdum of the impulse to transplant foreign generic hegemonies into the American literary context.

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