Gothic Trajectories: Latitudinarian Theology and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe
Robert J. Mayhew, University of Wales
Volume 15, no. 3-4, April-July 2003
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Since the earliest biographical writings — Walter Scott’s assessment and the memoir attached to Ann Radcliffe’s posthumously published novel Gaston de Blondeville — the novels of Radcliffe have been located in the trajectory by which the generic norms of Gothic fiction developed. Criticism has placed Radcliffe by anticipation in the context of subsequent developments in the Gothic genre. She is accepted as an important innovator but is also seen as having fallen short of realizing the genre’s full potential, largely owing to her penchant for explaining away supernatural events by naturalistic means. The overall assessment of this mode of criticism is well summarized by T.N. Talfourd: “Mrs Radcliffe may fairly be considered as the inventor of a new style of romance; equally distant from the old tales of chivalry and magic, and from modern representations of credible incidents and living manners. Her works partially exhibit the charms of each species of composition.” Such criticism was written some thirty years after the novels themselves, and thus has the benefit of seeing the generic trajectory of Gothic fiction in a way Radcliffe herself could not at the time of writing.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Ann Radcliffe” include:
Sublime Luxuries of the Gothic Edifice: Immersive Aesthetics and Kantian Freedom in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe
by Kristin M. Girten (ECF 28.4, Summer 2016)
Ann Radcliffe’s Scientific Romance
by Adam Miller (ECF 28.3, Spring 2016)
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Convents and Nuns” include:
Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess and The Distressed Orphan
by SHARON HARROW (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe’s “Delicate” Gothic
by YAEL SHAPIRA (ECF 18.4, Summer 2006)
Muddy Allegiance and Shiny Booty: Aphra Behn’s Anglo-Dutch Politics
by REBECCA S. WOLSK (ECF 17.1, October 2004)
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