British Romantic Novel and Essay.

T h e  G o t h i c  N o v e l :

< the term derived from the frequent setting of Gothic novels in a gloomy Middle Age castle

- inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) > flourished in the closing y. of 18^th c.

- reacted against comfort and security, political stability, and commercial progress by resisting the rule of reason

- Edmund Burke: (a) the sublime related to vastness, infinity, and astonishment; i.e. wild and mountainous scenery in nature, castle ruins and medieval cathedrals in architecture, (b) modified danger and pain produce a ‘delightful horror’ < infl. by Aristotle’s tragedy as an evocation of pity and fear to purge of these emotions: J. Milton’s Paradise Lost and W. Shakespeare’s tragedies

- subject = exploitation of mystery and terror, supernatural phenomena, dark and irrational side of human nature, perverse impulses, etc.

- protagonist = homme fatal, i.e. a villain torturing oth. because being himself tortured by an unspeakable guilt; with elements of diabolism, sensuality, and sadistic perversion: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Undolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1794)

- setting = somewhere in the past, in sullen landscapes and decaying mansions with dark dungeons, secret passages, and stealthy ghosts

- Gothicism in poetry: S. T. Coleridge’s Christabel; J. Keat’s Eve of St. Agnes; G. G. Byron’s hero-villains; and P. B. Shelley’s interest in the fantastic, the macabre, and in the unconscious mind, incl. incest

T h e  N o v e l  o f  P u r p o s e :

- propagated the new social and political theories

- frequently with Gothic elements

> William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), conc. with the persecution by a wealthy squire of his young secretary revealing evidence that the squire has committed murder <=> the lower class as a subject to power of the upper class

> M. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), conc. with a fabricated monster <=> the moral distortion imposed on an individual rejected by society because of his diverging from the norm

> M. Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), anticipated the Br. regional novel and the Br. historical novel

T h e  N o v e l  o f  M a n n e r s :

- J. Austen

T h e  H i s t o r i c a l  R o m a n c e :

- W. Scott

T h e  R o m a n t i c  E s s a y

- the Enlightenment > an explosion of potential readership

- reviews = issued 4x yearly; publ. lit. essays and essays on contemporary issues

- magazines = a monthly; publ. more miscellaneous materials

- the ‘familiar essay’ = a commentary on a non-technical subject written in a relaxed and intimate manner; often autobiog., reminiscent, and self-analytic

- the essayists incl. C. Lamb, W. Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey