ABSTRACT
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Gothic at a time when the fictional form was reaching the point of exhaustion. Hyperbolic, belated and adolescent, Shelley’s Gothic fiction has long been seen as ticking all the wrong boxes. If, as Timothy Morton remarks, Shelley was ‘very actively and vigorously concerned with re-imagining the body’ throughout his literary career, he emphatically inaugurated his protracted inscription of the physical in his early Gothic romances. Shelley’s models present several comparable moments of close scrutiny of the body, most evidently Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor, where horror also emerges through carefully detailed evocations of desired, victimized and tortured human frames. In Zastrozzi, Matilda is a figure of exceptional physical beauty, her body being repeatedly described as a ‘symmetrical form’;14 but, as the novel’s main desiring subject, she is mostly an active, observing character.
