1st Edition

Rise Of Gothic Novel

By Maggie Kilgour Copyright 1995

    One of the central images conjured up by the gothic novel is that of a shadowy spectre slowly rising from a mysterious abyss. In The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Maggie Kilgour argues that the ghost of the gothic is now resurrected in the critical methodologies which investigate it for the revelation of buried cultural secrets. In this cogent analysis of the rise and fall of the gothic as a popular form, Kilgour juxtaposes the writings of William Godwin with Mary Wollstonecraft, and Ann Radcliffe with Matthew Lewis. She concludes with a close reading of the quintessential gothic novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. An impressive and highly original study, The Rise of the Gothic Novel is an invaluable contribution to the continuing literary debates which surround this influential genre.

    Part I 1 The Nature of Gothic 2 Past and Present 3 The Sublime and the Odd 4 Everything that Rises Must Converge Part II 1 Godwin and the Gothic of Revolution 2 The Reveries of a Solitary Woman 3 The Chymicall Wedding and the Bourgeois Marriage Part III 1 From Here to Here: Radcliffe’s Plot of Female Development 2 Lewis’s Gothic Revolution 3 ‘A way thus dark and circuitous’: The Revolution Comes Full Circle Part IV 1 The Artist as Goth 2 The Rise of Gothic Criticism

    Biography

    Maggie Kilgour is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University. She is the author of From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation.