Lewis, Matthew Gregory. (1775 - 1818).
W o r k
The Monk (1796):
- a Gothic novel
- set in a Capuchin friary in Madrid: a small world of repression, obsession, ambition, and intrigue
- follows the fall of a saintly monk who is led into a life of depravity by a fiend-inspired woman and eventually becomes a murderer and rapist
- the monk ends up physically and spiritually broken: his agonisingly slow death is described in great detail
- investigates a tormented soul, semi-pornographically exploits incidents and images suggesting the labyrinthine nature of the protagonist’s life
- plays with hidden chambers, subterraneous passages, sealed vaults, etc. = suggests the concealed passions
- aesthetic demerits: badly constructed, lacking psychological depth, extravagant in every sense
x but: includes some scenes of power and achieved an immediate celebrity
The Castle Spectre (1796):
- a musical drama, the best known of his melodramatic plays
The Minister (1797):
- a translation from Friedrich Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (= Intrigue and Love)
The Bravo of Venice (1804):
- a translation from a German romance
Quote
"Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio's wounds; He had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes, and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable."
From The Monk (1796).
Basics
(Painting: H. W. Pickersgill. Source: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Matthew Gregory Lewis. (1775 - 1818). British. -
Work
Novelist. Playwright. Translator. Author of The Monk (1796). -
Genre
Romanticism. Gothicism.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.