ISBN: 9780826478887

The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction … Mehr…

The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction in England. This classic study emphasises the importance of Gothic novels as experiments in imaginative writing and of the study of feeling as central to Gothic, for its spell consists in the feelings it arouses and exercises. As pseudo-historical fantasy, Gothic fiction embodies contemporary neuroses, especially sexual fears and repressions, which run right through it and are basic to its conventions. Howells traces the effort to articulate these disconcerting emotions in symbol, incident, landscape and architecture. The chronological design suggests developments in Gothic, from the initial explorations of Mrs Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, through the Minerva Press novelists and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, to new directions taken by C.R. Maturin in Melmoth the Wanderer. Coral Ann Howells, Books, Fiction and Literature, Love, Mystery And Misery Books>Fiction and Literature The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction in England. This classic study emphasises the importance of Gothic novels as experiments in imaginative writing and of the study of feeling as central to Gothic, for its spell consists in the feelings it arouses and exercises. As pseudo-historical fantasy, Gothic fiction embodies contemporary neuroses, especially sexual fears and repressions, which run right through it and are basic to its conventions. Howells traces the effort to articulate these disconcerting emotions in symbol, incident, landscape and architecture. The chronological design suggests developments in Gothic, from the initial explorations of Mrs Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, through the Minerva Press novelists and Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," to new directions taken by C.R. Maturin in "Melmoth the Wanderer."<