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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
Diane Long Hoeveler. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. xix+250. $40.00.
David Punter's Gothic Pathologies argues that "in Gothic ... we in the West most recently confronted again, and continue to confront, the borders of our own uncertainty, of the troubling of our own attempts at text; took up the endless play with the possibility that, below the neatnesses and arrangements of the conscious mind, there lies precisely that vast hinterland where crags loom in the fog and where one's own longings for low and order are revealed for what they are, attempts to cover and conceal the depths of chaotic impulses inside us" (193). Like this summary sentence, which is characteristic of the author's style, the definition of the Gothic in this study is enthusiastic, vaguely contextualized, and sprawling: "in the context of the modern, Gothic is the paradigm of all fiction, all textuality" (1). In advancing that definition, Punter describes himself as "trying to inhabit a difficult middle ground between two approaches, which we might loosely call psychoanalytic and deconstructive" (217); and if some readers should imagine that such a ground must itself be a Gothic landscape, Punter would presumably be gladdened. Other readers, however, may find this ground to be much less difficult than its advertising would suggest.
Unquestionably, between it...
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