Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto
- Chapter 2 The Loyalist Gothic romance
- Chapter 3 Gothic ‘subversion’: German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis
- Chapter 4 The first poetess of romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe
- Chapter 5 The field of romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Chapter 2 - The Loyalist Gothic romance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto
- Chapter 2 The Loyalist Gothic romance
- Chapter 3 Gothic ‘subversion’: German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis
- Chapter 4 The first poetess of romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe
- Chapter 5 The field of romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Speak then, the hour demands; Is learning fled?
Spent all her vigour, all her spirit dead?
Have Gallick arms and unrelenting war
Borne all her trophies from Britannia far?
Shall nought but ghosts and trinkets be display'd,
Since Walpole ply'd the virtuoso's trade,
Bade sober truth revers'd for fiction pass,
And mus'd o'er Gothick toys through Gothick glass?
T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem, 1798In James White's Earl Strongbow (1789), a tourist at Chepstow Castle finds a manuscript which tells of a confrontation between a prisoner of Charles II and the ghost of a former Lord of Chepstow, Earl Strongbow, intent on narrating the story of his life. Like The Castle of Otranto, Earl Strongbow seems to resort to the costume of the distant past for its absurd and amusing ‘detail’, as its title character relates a series of anecdotes which culminate in an account of him hurling his squire from the castle battlements during a fit of rage. In The Adventures of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and The Adventures of King Richard Coeur de Lion, both written in 1791, White similarly catered for a knowing and leisured audience, expressing gratitude (in the latter's preface) to the fashionable readers who were ‘gothically given’ enough to divert themselves with his chronicles, and resolving to ‘explore the remote doings of antiquity, – and evince that our forefathers were as foolish as we are ourselves’.
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- Information
- Contesting the GothicFiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832, pp. 42 - 69Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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