Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840

by Dale Townshend

Overview

Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840 provides the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction; poetry; drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the relationship between literature and architecture is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains, to date, no monograph-length study of the intriguing and complex interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only the most cursory of treatments in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. In addressing this gap in contemporary scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic-architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of canonical and lesser-known texts and writers. Correspondingly, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were to a certain extent shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its 'survivalist' and 'revivalist' forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was always much more than a matter of style. Incarnating, for better or for worse, the memory of a vanished 'Gothic' age in the modern, enlightened present, Gothic architecture, be it ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation's past—a notable 'visionary' turn, as the antiquary John Pinkerton put it in 1788, in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated.

The volume establishes a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, and argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198845669
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University

Dale Townshend is Professor of Gothic Literature in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published widely on Gothic and Romantic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including most recently The Gothic World (with Glennis Byron; Routledge, 2014); Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (with Angela Wright; Cambridge University Press, 2014); Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Angela Wright; Edinburgh University Press, 2016); and Writing Britain's Ruins (with Michael Carter and Peter N. Lindfield; British Library, 2017). He was academic advisor on the 'Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination' exhibition at the British Library (2014-2015). Between June 2015 and June 2017, he was the Principal Investigator on an AHRC Leadership Fellowship entitled Writing Britain's Ruins, 1700-1850: The Architectural Imagination, and in 2016, held a Fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Table of Contents

PrefaceIntroduction: Gothic Antiquity, Gothic Architecture, Gothic Romance1. Associationist Aesthetics and the Foundations of the Architectural Imagination2. Horace Walpole's Enchanted Castles3. From 'Castles in the Air' to the Topographical Gothic: Locating Ann Radcliffe's Architectural Imagination4. Improvement, Repair, and the Uses of the Gothic Past: Architecture, Chivalry, and Romance5. Venerable Ruin' or 'Nurseries of Superstition': Ecclesiastical Architecture and the Gothic Literary Aesthetic6. Antiquarian Gothic Romance: Castles, Ruins, and Visions of Gothic AntiquityConclusion: From the Gothic to the Medieval: Historiography, Romanticism, and the Trajectories of the Architectural Imagination

Editorial Reviews

"Townshend's book is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched, clearly written, quite convincing, and powerfully argued answer—at last—to the incompleteness and polarization in this array of scholarship... Gothic Antiquity, then, is a masterpiece of its kind: densely packed because of its scholarly rigor but also a pleasure to read because of its lucid style and its well-crafted, logical organization... All future research on and teaching about the Gothic's heyday in England, the rise of Romanticism, and the beginnings of the Victorian era, in writing and architecture, will need to take account of this monumental achievement in aesthetic, literary, and historical scholarship." — Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona, The Wordsworth Circle

"Gothic Antiquity is essentially a literary study, but enriched by a clear understanding of the antiquarian engagement with the mediaeval past and its relics, and of the development of philosophical ideas of associationist aesthetics that together underpinned the rediscovery of the Gothic. It provides a detailed and useful summary of a substantial number of Gothic novels, their plots and their authors, and shows how the genre evolved from Walpole to Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith and Sophia Lee, on to 'Monk' Lewis and Maturin and beyond. Above all, it charts a sea-change in popular taste from the Augustan and classical certainties of the early eighteenth century, to an early nineteenth-century world where the head of a landed family might well re-build his seat in a Gothic style to demonstrate his family's antiquity (a successful City merchant might do the same to demonstrate his family's aspirations)." — Beckford Journal

From the Publisher