Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834

by Ellen Malenas Ledoux

Overview

Social Reform in Gothic Writing provides a transatlantic view of the politically transformative power that Gothic texts effected during the Revolutionary era (1764-1834) through providing fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical writing in a wide variety of genres.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349453924
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/01/2013
Edition description:	1st ed. 2013
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ellen Malenas Ledoux is Assistant Professor and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Rutgers University, Camden, USA. She specializes in Romanticism, the Gothic, and transatlantic writers of the Revolutionary period. She has published articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Women's Writing.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Fantastic Forms of Change 2. Emergent Forms: Horace Walpole, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century Reader 3. A Castle of One's Own: The Architecture of Emerging Feminism 4. Transmuting the Baser Metals: The Post-Revolutionary Audience, Political Economy, and Gothic Forms in Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century 5. 'Schemes of Reformation': Institutionalized Healthcare in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn 6. Re-forming Genres: Negotiating Slavery in the Works of Matthew Lewis Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Ledoux’s examination of gothic writing in relation to social reform … demonstrate its claims with evidence from a wide array of historical documents, and it succeeds in mounting a convincing argument about the ‘political activism’ of the early gothic … . the study is well written and rigorous, and it joins a recent groundswell of scholarship on the political and cultural work of gothic and horror fiction from the eighteenth century to the present.” (Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016)

From the Publisher