To explore the changes and to historicize the Gothic dream, this monograph views dreams as temporally charged phenomena and employs eighteenth century ideas about solitude and Burkean notions of the sublime and the monstrous. These concepts provide a useful framework through which to understand the relationships between the dreamer and the dream as well as the dreamer and society. The aesthetic sublime requires spatio-temporal distance while the political monstrous constitutes the erosion of distance and the collapse of boundaries. In the final chapter, theories of islandness are used to examine how the Gothic dream becomes a political tool for postcolonial writers.
This monograph argues that the Gothic exposes and establishes dreams as social and political, not merely individual, phenomena.The Gothic counters the Enlightenment and reimagines dreaming by making either or both prophecy and liminality central to the dream scene. While the first British Gothic novels, The Castle of Otranto (1765) and The Old English Baron (1778), feature unambiguously prophetic and providential dreams, in later novels, prophetic dreams continue to be central to the Gothic, but these later moments are complicated by a cloud of uncertainty. What we continually see is a vacillation between the sublime and the monstrous that reveals anxieties about British claims of progress and liberty. In the process, the Gothic dream comes to be a liminal space for the dramatisation of imperial fantasies and prophetic nightmares. In the twentieth century, postcolonial writers adapt the Gothic dream to subvert the teleology of imperialism.
To explore the changes and to historicize the Gothic dream, this monograph views dreams as temporally charged phenomena and employs eighteenth century ideas about solitude and Burkean notions of the sublime and the monstrous. These concepts provide a useful framework through which to understand the relationships between the dreamer and the dream as well as the dreamer and society. The aesthetic sublime requires spatio-temporal distance while the political monstrous constitutes the erosion of distance and the collapse of boundaries. In the final chapter, theories of islandness are used to examine how the Gothic dream becomes a political tool for postcolonial writers.
This monograph argues that the Gothic exposes and establishes dreams as social and political, not merely individual, phenomena.The Gothic counters the Enlightenment and reimagines dreaming by making either or both prophecy and liminality central to the dream scene. While the first British Gothic novels, The Castle of Otranto (1765) and The Old English Baron (1778), feature unambiguously prophetic and providential dreams, in later novels, prophetic dreams continue to be central to the Gothic, but these later moments are complicated by a cloud of uncertainty. What we continually see is a vacillation between the sublime and the monstrous that reveals anxieties about British claims of progress and liberty. In the process, the Gothic dream comes to be a liminal space for the dramatisation of imperial fantasies and prophetic nightmares. In the twentieth century, postcolonial writers adapt the Gothic dream to subvert the teleology of imperialism.
![Revolution, Empire, and the Gothic Dream](http://vs-images.bn-web.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.10.3)
Revolution, Empire, and the Gothic Dream
250![Revolution, Empire, and the Gothic Dream](http://vs-images.bn-web.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.10.3)
Revolution, Empire, and the Gothic Dream
250Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781839986741 |
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Publisher: | Anthem Press |
Publication date: | 12/31/2024 |
Series: | Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature , #1 |
Pages: | 250 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |