Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820
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Description
Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 by Diane Long Hoeveler provides the first comprehensive study of what are called “collateral gothic” genres—operas, ballads, chapbooks, dramas, and melodramas—that emerged out of the gothic novel tradition founded by Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe. The role of religion and its more popular manifestations, superstition and magic, in the daily lives of Western Europeans were effectively undercut by the forces of secularization that were gaining momentum on every front, particularly by 1800. It is clear, however, that the lower class and the emerging bourgeoisie were loath to discard their traditional beliefs. We can see their search for a sense of transcendent order and spiritual meaning in the continuing popularity of gothic performances that demonstrate that there was more than a residue of a religious calendar still operating in the public performative realm. Because this bourgeois culture could not turn away from God, it chose to be haunted, in its literature and drama, by God’s uncanny avatars: priests, corrupt monks, incestuous fathers, and uncles. The gothic aesthetic emerged during this period as an ideologically contradictory and complex discourse system; a secularizing of the uncanny; a way of alternately valorizing and at the same time slandering the realms of the supernatural, the sacred, the maternal, and the primitive.
ISBN
978-0814292303
Publication Date
2010
Publisher
Ohio State University Press
City
Columbus
Disciplines
English Language and Literature
Comments
Table of Contents
Gothic Riffs: Songs in the Key of Secularization
Gothic Mediations: Shakespeare, the Sentimental, and the Secularization of Virtue
“Rescue Operas” and Providential Deism
Ghostly Visitants: The Gothic Drama and the Coexistence of Immanence and Transcendence
Entr’acte. Melodramatizing the Gothic: The Case of Thomas Holcroft
The Gothic Ballad and Blood Sacrifice: From Bürger to Wordsworth
The Gothic Chapbook: The Class-Based Circulation of the Unexplained Supernatural