Michael Gamer. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon-Formation.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 255. $59.95.

The gothic was a harbinger of romanticism, but, aside from asserting the priority of the gothic, that post hoc formula leaves the historical relationship entirely unexplained. We often talk loosely about movements in literary history affecting other movements, but just what does that involve? Exactly how did the gothic cause the romantic movement to be what it was? What were the agents and agencies involved and how did they operate? Michael Gamer's astute monograph has not only given a convincing historical account of how the prior existence of the gothic as a genre affected three important writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but has done so in a way that suggests the more general value of his methods.

The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky said that, in literary history, descent passes not from father to son but from uncle to nephew, and indeed Michael Garner imagines the first generation of romantic writers as young adults embarrassed by their familial relationship to a wealthy but utterly disreputable uncle with libidinous personal habits and dangerous political associations. Around 1798, the gothic was undoubtedly the most popular literary genre in England: gothic novels written by imitators of Ann Radcliffe dominated not only book sales but, even more spectacularly, borrowings from circulating libraries, while gothic dramas such as Matthew Lewis' Castle Spectre (1797) could run for three solid months at Drury Lane.

But it was also the most despised literary genre. The gothic had been gendered as female reading, the facts about its actual readership to the contrary notwithstanding. And the female reader was characterized as vague and dreamy, unruddered, literal-minded, easily influenced, seducible into strong emotions and unenlightened thoughts by intense representations of unusual, extreme, sometimes supernatural events. Women were in danger from such literature, and so, with their greater responsibilities, were the men...

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