ABSTRACT
Like literature itself, literary criticism has its fashions—its fads and caprices and strange gleamings—all of which can shed an instructive light on intellectual history and indeed life itself. Surely no literary-historical phenomenon has undergone a more sweeping critical réévaluation over the past one hundred years than the late-eighteenth-century vogue for the “Gothic”—that exorbitant hankering after horror, gloom, and supernatural grotesquerie so palpable in Britain in the literature and art of the 1790s especially. Long disparaged as one of the more regrettable, even absurd episodes in English literary history, the so-called Gothic Revival of the later eighteenth century has in recent decades come to be seen as one of the signal aesthetic manifestations of the age—as a phenomenon both fascinating in its own right and crucial to a proper understanding of eighteenth-century art and culture more generally. Whether this renewed enthusiasm for the Gothic—and for Gothic fiction in particular—will result in some new consensus regarding the value of Gothic as a creative mode seems doubtful, given the extraordinarily polarizing effect the style has always exerted upon readers and critics alike. Yet one feels it nonetheless to be the case: that modern-day literary history has been “gothicized” more starkly and deeply than ever before.
