Gothic Criticism: a Survey, 1764–2004

Abstract

To chart the development of Gothic criticism, it might be argued, is to follow the progress of a genre from literary curiosity to distinctive and systematic cultural movement. A genre that forms the subject of a discrete and expanding body of criticism must surely, the argument runs, have gained acceptance within the Academy, and the right in consequence to police a canon or canons as well as affirm a body of generic conventions. To have attained such a worthy position, inevitably, implicates the genre in a mythical past-time when such a body of criticism could not have been contemplated, a less-enlightened age where Gothic was, if not precultural, then at least subcultural. This is a wonderful myth, and it is one which no doubt does much to reassure the critic at the dawn of the twenty-first century that he or she has escaped the strictures of a still-discernible Leavisite heritage. By accepting the Gothic, in teaching as well as in research, the modern Academy distances itself from an intolerant and elitist past, variously eighteenth-century, Victorian, or Leavisite. It proclaims a liberation of texts from obscurity and censorship, and in so doing sustains an edifice of the enlightened present. The Gothic, reassuringly, has been rescued from prejudice, has become something that the critics and authors commonly regarded as great, authoritative, or canonical, may now talk about openly with no embarrassment, save that of having to admit that their forebears were less enlightened. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.