ABSTRACT
The Revolution becomes a monstrous realisation of the elements associated with the sublime–mystery, a loss of boundaries, and confusion of differences. Part of its terror for Edmund Burke lies in its parody through literalisation of his own aesthetic ideal, which makes it his own gothic double, his art come to demonic life. The gothic revival has also been described as a form of regression; the genre has often been treated, usually implicitly, as an immature form, a throwback to an earlier stage of the literary tradition which rises in infantile resistance to the grand progress of the novel proper towards the maturity of realism. The gothic both represents and distorts the Romantic artist’s attempt to recover an earlier stage of individual development, childhood, which is idealised, like the gothic middle ages, as a time of symbiotic unity and oneness with the world before the alienation of adulthood set in.
