ABSTRACT
Satirical and often ideologically biased 'recipes' of the motifs and styles required to (re)produce and manufacture Gothic novels became common in the late 1790s. The Gothic cultural form suited the times as it challenged the limits of the predictable, natural and the possible in an age of widespread insecurity and uncertainty. In line with the theory that historical events and figures found a counterpart in the Gothic, David Worrall maintains that Gothic dramas commented covertly on the contemporary British political situation. Starting from Coleridge's list of mass-market appurtenances, Jeffrey Cox maintains that we can analyse the Gothic plays as a well-defined and identifiable body of drama. The dramatic trajectory of liberation of/from enclosed spaces – a political statement in itself — is a recurrent moment in the Gothic plot. Among the historians of the English Gothic drama, Jeffrey Cox has produced the most comprehensive taxonomy of the genre, adding much-needed historical as well as theoretical substance to Gothic drama criticism.
