ABSTRACT
The relation between what we call Romanticism and the Gothic tradition has exercised literary critics for many years now. Montague Summers, writing in 1938, was somewhat atypical in seeing the Gothic novel as primarily a Romantic and Catholic genre dealing with what is excluded from the prosaic, materialistinclined, Protestant realist tradition (Summers 1938). For most twentiethcentury critics who choose to theorise Gothic and its relation to literary Romanticism, Gothic was to be distinguished from Romanticism, and the opposition set up between the terms was a tool in the definition of the transcendence of Romanticism. In the 1920s Eino Railo in The Haunted Castle discussed Gothic as a crude, early version of Romanticism. This line of criticism was later taken up by Devendra Varma who declared that the Gothic was ‘“the leafmould” in which more exquisite and stronger plants were rooted’ (Varma 1966: 3). In Railo’s version, the significance of the Gothic lies in its provision of fodder for the Romantic imagination which Romantic poets will transform and spiritualise. According to Railo, Gothic phenomena implicitly discuss the psyche; however, the fact that the stuff of the psyche is presented in material terms (the haunted castle, etc.) becomes the grounds of the Gothic’s inferiority to the Romantic, for the Romantic involves ‘a setting aside of mere outward effects and the transference of psychological phenomena into the foreground’ (Railo 1927: 177).
