Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture

O'Malley explores Victorian Gothic as a genre through which British authors defined their culture and what was outside it.

Patrick R. O'Malley (Author)

9780521863988, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 September 2006

296 pages, 5 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.615 kg

'This is a study 'dedicated to the task of tracing the metaphorical gargoyles and arches that produced nineteenth-century British concepts of sexual and religious difference' and it does so with wit, theoretical dexterity and scholarly depth.' Andrew Tate, University of Lancaster

It has long been recognised that the Gothic genre sensationalised beliefs and practices associated with Catholicism. Often, the rhetorical tropes and narrative structures of the Gothic, with its lurid and supernatural plots, were used to argue that both Catholicism and sexual difference were fundamentally alien and threatening to British Protestant culture. Ultimately, however, the Gothic also provided an imaginative space in which unconventional writers from John Henry Newman to Oscar Wilde could articulate an alternative vision of British culture. Patrick O'Malley charts these developments from the origins of the Gothic novel in the mid-eighteenth century, through the mid-nineteenth-century sensation novel, toward the end of the Victorian Gothic in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. O'Malley foregrounds the continuing importance of Victorian Gothic as a genre through which British authors defined their culture and what was outside it.

Introduction: skeletons in the cloister
1. Goths and Romans: the literature of Gothic from Radcliffe to Ruskin
2. 'The Church's closet': Victorian Catholicism and the crisis of interpretation
3. Domestic Gothic: unveiling Lady Audley's Secret
4. The blood of the saints: vampirism from Polidori to Stoker
5. 'Monstrous and terrible delight': the aesthetic Gothic of Pater and Wilde
6. Conclusions: Oxford's ghosts and the end of the Gothic
Works cited.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]