Plains of darkness: The gothic novel and the pastoral myth

Abstract

The Gothic novel in England is not a pastoral idyll invulnerable to historical or political changes and undisturbed by moral or spiritual anxieties. The rural landscape in it is a part of the complex social, economic and ethical history determining the agrarian arrangements of the age. It rejects pastoral nostalgia as a demonic illusion, and concerns itself with those specific conditions of inequality, power, work and ownership of land which determine the material lives of human beings. The article discusses in detail the images of nature and the social relations that dominate the scenes in the countryside in the novels of Mrs Radcliffe, James Hogg, M. G. Lewis, Mary Shelley, William Godwin and others.

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