Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820
The Import of Terror

This book explores the development of the Gothic through the history of martial, political and literary conflict between Britain and France.

Angela Wright (Author)

9781107034068, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 April 2013

234 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.49 kg

'Wright's book traces the French influences that Walpole felt compelled to play down, as did subsequent Gothic authors from Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee to Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, whose work appeared just as the British antipathy toward France rose to a fever pitch of anti-Jacobin hysteria. Her book is thus a history of writers' secret love for a culture that their own surroundings required them to hate or at least to denigrate. It offers up to the reader the less evident aspects of the way Gothic fiction crossed the Channel back and forth in the form of influences, translations, parodies, borrowings, and outright plagiarisms.' Yael Shapira, Common Knowledge

In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continuing connections between Gothic literature and France through the realms of translation, adaptation and unacknowledged borrowing led to strong suspicions of Gothic literature taking on a subversive role in diminishing British patriotism. Angela Wright explores the development of Gothic literature in Britain in the context of the fraught relationship between Britain and France, offering fresh perspectives on the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis and their contemporaries.

Introduction
1. The mysterious author Horace Walpole
2. The translator cloak'd: Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith
3. Versions of Gothic and terror
4. The castle under threat: Ann Radcliffe's system and the romance of Europe
5. 'The order disorder'd': French convents and British liberty
Conclusion: afterlives
Works cited.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]