Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

To a certain extent, the Gothic is an alteration of the sentimental novel, which was
pioneered by Samuel Richardson. Many believe that the Gothic novel originated in 1764
with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and at the dawn of the
nineteenth century owed its immense popularity to the novels of Ann Radcliffe (The
Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) (Baker 179, Wittman 65-66). It is important to note,
however, that as a genre the Gothic escapes any clear categorization, for it does not
follow any definite norms or conventions. Michael Gamer reflects on Robert Miles’
conceptualization of the Gothic as a “discursive site,” a “carnivalesque mode” which
crosses genres (3) and argues that this perspective “recalls the open characterization of
Jeffrey Cox and Marshall Brown; for both, the Gothic is concerned primarily with
“limits” and “excesses” and therefore defined by assumptions that vary across a culture
and that change with history” (9). It could be considered that by crossing established
generic boundaries, by inverting high/low polarities, and by addressing the limits it
exceeds, the Gothic seems to fit the standard definition of “transgression.” M. M.
Bakhtin observes, however, that as an “uncompleted” (i.e. a “young” and “developing”)
genre, there is no “single definitive, stable characteristic of the novel” (The Dialogic
Imagination 8). Hence, the Russian formalist suggests that the novel in general eludes
generic categorizations. This lack of stable characteristics of the novel in general and the
Gothic in particular could possibly indicate why the generic denomination of “Gothic”
was only coined a number of decades later to describe the particular strand of novels
made popular by Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis 10 . Although the Gothic may escape
traditional conventions as a genre, the term itself is originally associated with a particular
10 Lewis’ novel, for example, was subtitled A Romance.
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