Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832

by James Watt

• ISBN13: 9780521640992
• ISBN10: 0521640997
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-06-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

James Watt’s historically grounded account of Gothic fiction takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterized at times by antagonistic relations between various writers or works. Central to his argument about these works’ writing and reception is a nuanced understanding of their political import: Walpole’s attempt to forge an aristocratic identity, the loyalist affiliations of many neglected works of the 1790s, a reconsideration of the subversive reputation of The Monk, and the ways in which Radcliffean romance proved congenial to conservative critics. Watt concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and examines the process by which the Gothic came to be defined as a monolithic tradition, in a way that continues to exert a powerful hold.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	x
Introduction	1	(11)
1 Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto	12	(30)
2 The Loyalist Gothic romance	42	(28)
3 Gothic 'subversion': German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis	70	(32)
4 The first poetess of romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe	102	(28)
5 The field of romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic	130	(30)
Notes	160	(26)
Bibliography	186	(15)
Index	201