This volume broadens the critical understanding of Ann Radcliffe’s work and includes explorations of the publication history of her work, her engagement with contemporary accounts of aesthetics, her travel writing, and her poetry.
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was the best-selling author of the eighteenth century and her Gothic novels set the tone for a generation of Gothic writers. Regarded as having made a pioneering contribution to the Female Gothic of the period she was also an important critic of the Gothic’s different forms. This collection also includes an analysis of Radcliffe’s account of her medical ailments in her Commonplace Book which provides a new way of thinking about female bodies in pain and how they are represented in her novels.
The collection provides an important critical reassessment of a major Gothic writer of the period. It will be of interest to scholars working on the Gothic, eighteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.
Introduction: Locating Radcliffe
Andrew Smith and Mark Bennett
1. Radcliffe, George Robinson and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture: Beyond the Circulating Library
JoEllen DeLucia
2. The Surprising Mrs Radcliffe: Udolpho’s Artful Mysteries
Robert Miles
3. Radcliffe’s Aesthetics: Or, the Problem with Burke and Lewis
Andrew Smith
4. The Masquerade in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian
Jakub Lipski
5. "As Like as Peppermint Water is to Good French Brandy": Ann Radcliffe and Hester Lynch Salusbury (Thrale) Piozzi
Marianna D’Ezio
6. Ann Radcliffe’s Commonplace Book: Assembling the Female Body and the Material Text
Cheryl L. Nixon
7. Radcliffe’s Poetic Legacy: Female Confinement in the "Gothic Sonnet"
Olivia Loksing Moy
Biography
Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. His published books include Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century (2000), Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siècle (2004), Gothic Literature (2007, revised 2013), The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (2010), and Gothic Death 1740–1914: A Literary History (2016). He is a past president of the International Gothic Association.
Mark Bennett completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK, on the relationship between travel writing and Gothic fiction in Radcliffe and other eighteenth-century authors. He currently works in student communications and HE policy. His publications include work on Ann Radcliffe, travel writing, and Victorian popular fiction.
