Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation

by Michael Gamer

Overview

This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre—the Gothic. Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521773287
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/04/2000
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #40
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.75(d)
Lexile:	1790L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; A note on the text; Introduction: Romanticism's 'pageantry of fear'; 1. Gothic, reception and production; 2. Gothic and its contexts; 3. 'Gross and violent stimulants': producing Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800; 4. National supernaturalism: Joanna Baillie, Germany, and the Gothic drama; 5. 'To foist thy stale romance': Scott, antiquarianism, and authorship; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Michael Gamer's astute monograph has not only given a convincing historical account of how the prior existence of the gothic as a genre affected three important writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but has done so in a way that suggests the more general value of his methods." Studies in Romanticism

"An exemplary historicist account of the troubled formations of "Romantic" authorship....a lucid and persuasive work that brings real illumination to the murky origins of the Romantic ideology." Nineteenth Century Literature

"This book has opened up a fascinating and compelling line of inquiry." Notes and Queries

"Gamer's book...makes a real contribution to our thinking about questions that have seldom been asked before." Romantic Circles

"[A] valuable new book." European Romantic Review

"An impressive first book. [,,.] Gamer writes wonderfully about Lyrical Ballads. Eighteenth-Century Studies

"Each chapter demonstrates again Gamer's solid grasp of the material nature of literary production and deserves close reading by students of both gothicism and romanticism...His careful scholarship and clear line of argument will undoubtedly inform continuing work on the subject." Romanticism on the Net

From the Publisher