Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Peter Garrett

Published by Cornell University Press 2003

Gothic Reflections

Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Peter Garrett

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501724282

Overview
Contents

About this book

The Gothic has long been seen as offering a subversive challenge to the norms of realism. Locating both Gothic and mainstream Victorian fiction in a larger literary and cultural field, Peter K. Garrett argues that the oppositions usually posed between...

Author / Editor information

Peter K. Garrett is Professor of English at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Victorian Multiplot Novel and Scene and Symbol from George Eliot to James Joyce and editor of Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Dubliners.

Reviews

Harry Shaw, Cornell University:

Peter Garrett realizes that Gothic fiction has much to reveal about the plight of the isolated individual, but what seems most remarkable about Gothic Reflections is its highly original revelation of a range of ways in which Gothic opens out into the realm of the social and dialogic.

Jonathan Arac, Columbia University:

Itself the fruit of long reflection, Gothic Reflections compresses a potent threefold agenda: it opens a new case for the importance of Edgar Allan Poe; it explores the three great monster stories contributed to modern mass culture by nineteenth-century literature; and it precisely defines a relation between Gothic and the canonical works of Dickens, Eliot, and James.

Marshall Brown, University of Washington:

In a series of interlocked readings ranging from Horace Walpole through the romantics and Victorians to Henry James, Peter Garrett probes the tensions between narrative conviction and readerly seduction, private confession and social communication, gothic destabilization and realistic consolidation. Venturing in new and revealing ways well beyond Bakhtin, Garrett draws on formalism and narratology to critique the limits of both deconstructive and ideological allegories. All students of the meanings and shapes of nineteenth-century fiction will benefit from confronting this thoughtful and challenging book.

Patrick Brantlinger, Indiana University:

Gothic Reflections demonstrates the interplay of Gothic and realistic elements from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) to James's The Ambassadors. Everyone who studies nineteenth-century fiction as well as recent theories of narrative will find it helpful, at times provocative (forceful but not forced), and always engaging.

Approaching literary gothicism with an emphasis on its reflexivity, Garrett offers interesting interpretations of old warhorse fictions by writers from Horace Walpole through Henry James.... Overall, Garrett highlights the psychological plausibilities inherent in gothicism, which bear out Poe's dictum that terror emanates from the soul rather than from sleazy gimmicks to enthrall imperceptive readers. Summing Up: All collections supporting serious study of literary Gothicism, upper-division undergraduates and above.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. The Force of a Frame
1. Poe and the Tale Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
2. Gothic Reflexivity from Walpole to Hogg Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
3. Poe and His Doubles Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
Part II. Monster Stories
4. Frankenstein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
5. Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
6. Dracula Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
Part III. The Language of Destiny
7. Dickens Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
8. Eliot Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
9. James Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	192
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 256
Keywords: Literary Studies; England

eBook

Published: August 6, 2018
ISBN: 9781501724282