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

by James Watt

Overview

This 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 writers or works. Watt examines the novels' political import and concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and perceptions of the Gothic as a monolithic tradition, which continue to exert a powerful hold.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521640992
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/28/1999
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #33
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto; 2. The Loyalist Gothic romance; 3. Gothic 'subversion': German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis; 4. The first poetess of Romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe; 5. The field of Romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"James Watt argues that generic labels need to be re-examined, with greater attention given to the historical specificity of certain "so-called Gothic" works. This is an exciting historicist study that provides important contextual material for Gothic scholars." British and American Literatures

"...Contesting the Gothic is impressively researched, well-documented, and convincing in its claims." Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

"The exposition is lucid, the reasoning scrupulous, the tone measured and never polemical. The book can be recommended to anyone as the model of a focused and thoroughly professional investigation that carves out a niche of originality in a very crowded literary shelf." Eighteenth-Century Studies

From the Publisher