Contesting the Gothic
Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832

A re-examination of the historical vicissitudes of the Gothic novel from Walpole to Scott, first published in 1999.

James Watt (Author)

9780521640992, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 June 1999

220 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.5 kg

"The exposition is lucid, the reasoning scrupulous, the tone measured and never polemical. The book can be recommended to anyone as the model of a focused and thoroughly professional investigation that carves out a niche of originality in a very crowded literary shelf." Eighteenth-Century Studies

James Watt's historically grounded account of Gothic fiction, first published in 1999, takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterized at times by antagonistic relations between various writers or works. Central to his argument about these works' writing and reception is a nuanced understanding of their political import: Walpole's attempt to forge an aristocratic identity, the loyalist affiliations of many neglected works of the 1790s, a reconsideration of the subversive reputation of The Monk, and the ways in which Radcliffean romance proved congenial to conservative critics. Watt concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and examines the process by which the Gothic came to be defined as a monolithic tradition, in a way that continues to exert a powerful hold.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto
2. The Loyalist Gothic romance
3. Gothic 'subversion': German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis
4. The first poetess of Romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe
5. The field of Romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]