ABSTRACT
Radcliffe was the most popular novelist of her day and still plays a significant role in the understanding of literature from the period. Whilst many of her contemporaries have now been republished, she still stands as a unique and highly influential figure. This chapter talks about Radcliffe as a woman writer, whilst helping to relocate her work within a much broader literary, cultural and historical context. The creation of the “Gothic” through a self-conscious Gothic aesthetic was lampooned by Lewis in The Monk, which prompted Radcliffe to revisit her engagement with Burke in The Italian. In The Italian, she cultivates a less visible Burkean discourse of obscurity, which is no longer centred on the type of rhetorical self-consciousness that had characterized Udolpho. Udolpho is often self-conscious in its Gothic constructions and can be seen as drawing on Burke’s claim, towards the end of A Philosophical Enquiry, that the sublime can be rhetorically produced.
