Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.018

16 - Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

George Haggerty

Edited by

Robert L. Caserio and

Clement Hawes

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Robert L. Caserio: Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Clement Hawes: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

Gothic fiction emerged froma dreamand subsided into infamy, but in the years 1764–1810 it included works that were thematically challenging and formally innovative; and much that first took shape in gothic fiction changed the face of novel-writing for generations after its lurid heyday. The rather infamous inception of the gothic novel – Horace Walpole recounts a dream in which antiquarian imaginings led him to scribble far into the night – is repeated and recast in other famous gothic iterations such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898). Most important, however, are the details of Walpole's dream itself and the ways in which it inspired an incipient gothic technique. Walpole's account, addressed to his friend William Cole, describes the dream in full:

Your partiality to me and Strawberry [Hill] have I hope inclined you to excuse the wildness of the story. You will even have found some traits to put you in mind of this place. When you read of the picture quitting its panel, did not you recollect the portrait of Lord Falkland all in white in my gallery? Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 262 - 276

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.018 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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