Horror Literature - Literary Criticism, Gothic Novel - Literary Movements

The Gothic Text

Name: The Gothic Text
Author: Marshall Brown
ISBN: 9780804739122

by Marshall Brown

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Overview

The Gothic Text offers an innovative account of a much-studied mode. It combines the teleological approach to literary history developed in the author's Preromanticism with 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 readings that approach classics of the genre from unusual angles. Accessibly written and argued in careful, lively detail, The Gothic Text includes extended readings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, among others, along with a fresh survey of theatrical precursors to the gothic and a thoroughly researched study of the psychology of consciousness that developed out of Kant's idealist philosophy toward a gothic sensibility. The Gothic Text will give many new impulses to the study of romanticism, nineteenth-century fiction, and the origins of psychoanalysis.

Synopsis

Combining a new genealogy for the gothic novel with original research into gothic contexts in German idealist thought and romantic psychology, The Gothic Text offers lively readings of British and Continental novels pointing back toward the Enlightenment and ahead toward Freud.

About the Author, Marshall Brown

Marshall Brown is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of Turning Points (Stanford, 1997) and Preromanticism (Stanford, 1991).