ABSTRACT
The Gothic novel reached its first peak, in terms of quantity and popularity, in the mid-l790s. It is an exaggeration to say that 'this body of fiction may well have established the popularity of the novel-form'. The development in sophistication which Gothic fiction displays in this brief span of years is remarkable; where Udolpho accepted many of the narrative conventions of earlier fiction. The Monk strove to upset them directly by simple reversal of previously accepted boundaries of the communicable and the permissible. Certainly there appears to be a distinct streak of sadism in Matthew Lewis's relations both to his characters and to his readers, although this tendency within Gothic probably antedated the influence of de Sade, which was always fairly limited. The dramatic theory of catharsis has always been self-consciously related to some such idea, and it is the cathartic pretensions and ambiguities of the drama of Webster and Tourneur which reappear in Gothic works.
