How Gothic Literature Died

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Read all about it! The Gothic is dead! No more dark castles and creepy murderous monks. After peaking in the 1790s, the public addiction to spooky stories and unnerving tales all but dwindled out to make way for straight-laced Victorian realist fiction.

Or did it?

While the 1790s may well have given us an unmatched explosion of Gothic novels, like those by illustrious writer Ann Radcliffe, it’s not as if our love for terror fizzled out as the new century wore on. It just changed shape.

What shape did it change into? What became of Radcliffe’s reputation as the Victorian period wore on? Does reading novels really lead young women to become ladies of the night? Find out in our latest video!


Written, presented, and edited by Rosie Whitcombe
@books_ncats

Directed, produced, and edited by Matty Phillips
@ma_ps_
mphotos.uk

Guest Gaffer: Chris O'Grady
@cog_photo


Bibliography

'Art. VIII.—The Heroine; or, Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader’, The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, vol. 4 (December 1813) pp. 623-9

Chaplin, Sue, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Romantic-era fiction’, Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: CUP, 2014) pp. 203-18

‘No. XXXIV. Fairyland’, The Ghost, iss. 34 (August 1796) pp. 33-6

Norton, Rictor, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999)

‘Novels and Romances’, Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, vol. 92 (June 1793)

‘On Novels and Romances’, The Scots Magazine, vol. 64 (June 1802) pp. 470-4

‘On Romances and Novels, and the Proper Employment of the Time of the Fair Sex’, The Scots Magazine, vol. 59 (June 1797) pp. 374-7

Prescott, William H., Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co, 1882)

‘Some Remarks on the Use of the Preternatural in Works of Fiction’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 3 (September 1818) pp. 648-50

Townshend, Dale, and Wright, Angela, ‘Gothic and Romantic engagements: The critical reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789-1850’, Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, pp. 3-32