God & the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition

by Alison Milbank

Overview

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198824466
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/25/2018
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alison Milbank, Associate Professor of Literature and Theology, University of Nottingham

Alison Milbank is Associate Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham. She was John Rylands Research Fellow at the University of Manchester and after a temporary position at Cambridge, taught for five years at the University of Virginia. She has taught at Nottingham since 2004, and is also Priest Vicar and Canon Theologian at Southwell Minster. She has published widely on the Gothic, also publishes on Anglican ecclesiology and theology. Her publications include Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (1992) and Preaching Radical and Orthodox (co-edited with John Hughes and Arabella Milbank; 2017).

Table of Contents

IntroductionPart I: Whig Gothic in the Long Reformation1. Cain's Castles: The Emergence of Protestant Gothic in the Reformation2. Bare, Ruined Choirs: Gothic Nostalgia and the Reformation3. The Secret of Divine Providence: Whig Gothic and the Grotesque in Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Matthew Lewis4. Beyond the Awful Veil: Melancholic Theology and the In-between in Ann Radcliffe5. Paradoxes of the Heart: Religious Anthropology in Charles Brockden Brown6. Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley's Dantesque Theology of CreationPart II: Duality and Mediation in Scottish Gothic7. Truly Two: Calvinist Anthropology and the Double from Christopher Marlowe to John Buchan8. Black books and Brownies: Narrating the Reformation in Walter Scott and James HoggPart III: The Ambivalence of Blood in Irish Gothic9. Mimetic Contagion: Charles Maturin and the Theology of Sacrifice10. In a Glass Darkly? Narrating Death and the Afterlife in Sheridan Le Fanu11. Finding a Via Media: Bram Stoker and MediationPart IV: Later Gothic: Re-enchanting the Material12. Supernatural Naturalism in Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte13. Holy Terrors: The Mystical Gothic of Arthur Machen, Evelyn Underhill, and Charles Williams14. Ecclesiastical Gothic: J. Meade Falkner and M. R. JamesEpilogueBibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Milbank's work is valuable not just in that it should prompt in the literary academy a chastised return to the Gothic with a more religiously attuned critical sense, but also in that she raises important questions about what happens to faith when it is shorn of its imagination, its instinct for the liminal and its arcane ritual, and made to conform to too much rational dissection, reasonable practice and 'scientific' moderation." — Jonathan Herapath, University of Kent, Theology

From the Publisher