THE GOTHIC TEXT [Hardcover]

Romantic gothic fiction is not exciting. Gothic novels are not ghost stories. Gothic novels are not women's writing.Opening with these three theses,The Gothic Textundertakes a fresh approach to a much-studied mode. Marshall Brown combines the teleological approach to literary history developed in hisPreromanticismwith a European perspective on the one truly international literary form of its era. New insights into literary history and the history of ideas provide a framework for innovative close readingsof Horace Walpole'sThe Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe'sThe Italian, and Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein, among othersthat approach classics of the genre from unusual angles. The book also provides a thoroughly researched account of German romantic psychology as it developed out of Kant's idealist philosophy into a gothic sensibility. Accessibly written and argued in careful, lively detail,The Gothic Textgives many new impulses to the study of romanticism, nineteenth-century fiction, and the origins of psychoanalysis. The story [Brown] tells converts the quirks and games of gothic fantasies into a dark and universal truth about the mysteries of human nature. Marshall Brown is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author ofTurning Points(Stanford, 1997) andPreromanticism(Stanford, 1991). [The Gothic Textis] conveyed with such grace of style and such a range of reference here that every student of the Gothic and the Romanticandtheir relationship ought to take account of it from now on. [A] highly readable and concisely coherent book. Combining a new genealogy for the gothic novel with original research into gothic contexts in German idealist thought and romantic psychology,The Gothic Textoffers lively readings of British and Continental novels pointing back toward the Enlightenment and ahead toward Freud. Brown . . . takes a fresh al¢