ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the treatment of these issues in Richard Hurd's Moral and Political Dialogues and Letters on Chivalry and Romance, and then to discuss the relation between his arguments and those of Elizabeth Montagu. Montagu explicitly acknowledges her debt to Hurd's theories, it explores the ways in which her arguments both adopt his theories and diverge significantly from them, and finally to consider in more general terms the implications of the gendering of Gothic. The chapter suggests that characterizes Gothic theory describes a model for government through prejudice, a model reminiscent of the arguments for the prescriptive authority of custom advanced by Burke and Samuel Johnson. The Gothic represents actions or truths which are historically diverse and discrete, and it is therefore characterized by an apparent formlessness, a negation of public unity. Hurd describes this negative form, this coincidence of fantasy and pluralized truth, through an extended analogy between literature and garden-design.
