The first British novel was published in 1719 = Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe As a new invention, these novelists experimented
with form and content. Epistolary structure Amorous & Gothic
fiction Popular but shameful!
Slide 3
Shift from order and reason to emotion and imagination If
science explains our existence, where is there space for feeling,
reflection, thinking, exploration, and emotion? Romantics believed
that science could NOT fully grasp the essence of human. head vs.
heart OR sense vs. sensibility Jane Austen novel- Sense and
Sensibility 1811
Slide 4
Lyrical Ballads- 1798/ Wordsworth & Coleridge Big 6 Shelley
Keats Byron Coleridge Wordsworth Blake Satanic School- Byron &
Shelley People saw Romantic writing as morally reproachable!
Slide 5
Past- return to Medieval Times & Knights tales Imagination-
what man can create with his mind that cannot be created with
science Common Man- everyday life/ not just stories about
aristocrats Idealization of Women- a return to the chivalry of the
Medieval Times Nature- growing Industrialization & the
Industrial Revolution makes man appreciate nature even more
Emotion- feelings as more true to the human experience than
scientific formulas
Slide 6
Gothic vs. Romantic by Hume Shift from Neoclassical ideals of
order and reason toward Romantic belief in emotion and imagination
Refers to Burkes essay on the sublime- terror is the authors
principal engine to grip and affect the reader one of a kind
treatment of the psychological problem of evil
Slide 7
the Gothic form had a curious appeal in terms of weaving a
beauty of the unpleasant, the horrifying and even grotesque This
had a powerful impact on the human senses which Romantic fiction
was all about. Gothic fiction gave way to Romantic fiction
Slide 8
Writers and critics in this period treated Gothic works like
The Castle of Otranto at the time, collectively referred to as
terrorist literature, for their ability to induce feelings of
horrorboth as objects of scorn, and as (often unacknowledged)
sources of inspiration.
Slide 9
The Gothic was a matter of particular concern for writers and
critics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries
primarily because it was a phenomenally popular literary genre,
particularly for women readers. Ex. Catherine Morland in Jane
Austens Northanger Abbey hiding The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne
Radcliffe
Slide 10
One of the most common accusations against the Gothic was that
it was fundamentally immoral: Gothic romances were said to corrupt
their readers minds and encourage social disorder. The pedagogical
effect of the genre on children was thought to be especially
dangerous. An anonymous critic, who wrote a polemic against
Terrorist Novel Writing in The Spirit of the Public Journals for
1797, denounced the Gothic for illustrating grotesque fantasies
that defied the limits of common sense, claiming that these
fantasies were bad moral lessons, which carr[y] the young readers
imagination into such a confusion of terrors, as must be hurtful.
Unlike useful novels, which accurately depict human life and
manners, with a view to direct the conduct in the important duties
of life, and to correct its follies, Gothic romances illustrate
bizarre situations reaped from the distorted ideas of lunatics. In
this critics view, Gothic romances were hardly idle enjoyments:
they were insidious implements of chaos that would ruin young
peoples capacity for labour and for public service. This
all-too-common taste for the marvelous and the terrible was, as the
Monthly Review stated in 1796, akin to a plague, an infection, that
must be stamped out for the health of the nation (qtd. in Epstein
205). The effect of the Gothic on women was thought to be, if
anything, even more frightening. Terrorist fiction was accused of
producing a cohort of mannish women, who would rather dream of
death-defying adventures and thrilling romances than settle down,
get married, and attend to their feminine duties.
Slide 11
In the eyes of conservative critics, a whole generation of
women and, by extension, a whole generation of wives and mothers,
the very future of Englandwas in danger of contamination by the
Gothic. The sanctity of matrimony itself was threatened by these
books, which trained women to imagine marriage not as a solemn
union before the watchful eyes of Church and State, but as a
dramatic spectacle, in which bride and groom would pass through
long and dangerous galleries, where the lights burn blue, the
thunder rattles, and the great window at the end presents the
hideous visage of a murdered man (Terrorist 601). In a world where
women preferred to fantasize about confronting hosts of ghouls and
nightmares with a dashing young man than marrying the proper
gentleman selected for them by their parents, it was not hard for
conservatives to imagine that social decay was imminent. By
emphasizing power relations and entaglements, and developing themes
of veiling and entrapment, the Gothic taught women to do the
unthinkable: suspect the men in their liveshusbands, fathers, and
priestsof potentially harbouring malevolent intentions towards them
(Epstein 205). Gothic romances were disparaged not only for filling
womens heads with impossible dreams and potentially turning females
against their male rulers, but also for touting profligacy and
indolence.
Slide 12
Anyone wanting to make a quick dollar could successfully write
a bestselling Gothic romance. Gothic authors were accused of being
less artists than manufacturers, less writers than druggists
following pre-made prescriptions, pushing vast quantities of
mass-produced novels onto the market. The entire genre was
effectively maligned by such attacks as a bourgeois conspiracy: a
secret moneymaking pact between greedy booksellers, printers, and
hack writers.
Slide 13
Coleridge held a derogatory opinion of Gothic novels. His
friend and literary collaborator William Wordsworth took many
malicious, in-direct snipes at the Gothic in the preface to the
second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the foundational work of English
Romanticism. Wordsworth derided the Gothicwhich he pejoratively
foreignized as frantic novels, sickly and stupid German
tragediesfor stirring up overly strong, forceful emotions like
terror and despair (Wordsworth 267). In his view, Gothic novels
were textual drugs, which numbed human faculties of sympathy and
imagination, and their devoted readers were addicts possessed by a
degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation (Wordsworth 267). The
genre employed a plethora of gross and violent stimulants, which
obscured, rather than revealed, the nature of reality (Wordsworth
266). Stylistically, the Gothic was overwrought in its prose and
melodramatic in its themes, littered with gaudiness and inane
phraseology (Wordsworth 264). In many respects, Wordsworth
theorized what he and Coleridge were doing in their poemsi.e. using
unadorned, simple language to meditate in tranquility upon powerful
emotions that were experienced by ordinary, rustic men and women,
and induced by everyday situations in nature as the polar opposite
of the Gothic. Romantic poetry was akin to a twelve-step program
for weaning society off its addiction to extravagant Gothic
romances.
Slide 14
What Romantic and Gothic literature share is a belief that the
chief role of literature should be to arouse and channel primal
human affects and emotions like fear, wonder and eroticism. Such
sentiments are powerful and potentially transgressive, having the
capacity to unsettle rigid hierarchical social divisions, which is
why both Gothic and Romantic authors were, at times, considered
deviant by Englands establishment. While Gothic works like The
Castle of Otranto, which are notorious for having wooden, stock
characters and predictable situations, focus on surfaces,
externalities and seemingly superficial details, Romantic works
tend to focus on depthsthe rich, lively, complex depths of the
natural world and the human psyche in particular. We can interpret
the Gothic, and all of the complicated responses to it, as the
symptoms of a society struggling to think through the implications
of a great many significant changes: changes in the extent and
meaning of literacy, and changes in how humans understand their own
lives and the lives of people around them.
Slide 15
Slide 16
1764 Generally regarded as the first Gothic novel ever written
Built a home called Strawberry Hill in the classic Gothic
architecture before his Victorian successors would adopt the
style