Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

101
To understand the controversy surrounding the release of Lewis’ novel, it is
important first to take into consideration various implications regarding genre and its
respective facets of authorship and readership. As an offspring of a more generalized
genre of prose fiction—the romance—the Gothic novel was subjected to the same attacks
as its predecessor. Since the late seventeenth century, romance was perceived to be an
inferior genre, for it did not fulfill the criteria of great literature; it served as a distraction
and was considered to be void of any didactic purpose. Gamer cites various
contemporaneous periodicals 11 in concluding that the novel as a form of literature was
not considered to be “serious,” but rather, merely provided for the entertainment of a
specific “lower” class of readers:
[these periodicals] deploy arguments that share common
assumptions about class and about reading for pleasure, arguing
implicitly that “romances and the like” do not belong in a serious
publication because men of “learning” cannot be interested in
them, that unlearned men and “Ladies” by definition read with
desire, and that to read with desire is to corrupt one’s mind if one
happens to be uneducated. (52)
Similarly, in Rambler, No 4, Samuel Johnson quotes Horace’s dictum (utile et dulci) as
an epigraph; he suggests that fiction should not evade this paradigm and argues that in
contrast to poetry, “these books [i.e. romances] are written chiefly to the young, the
ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions to
life” (463). In the eighteenth century, the potential negative influences of romance on its
assumed lower class—mostly female—audience became an explosive issue. On the one
hand, drawing from his reading of Johnson and other sources, Gamer suggests that the
major objection to reading novels was that “romance presents a ‘danger’ to readers to the
11 Such as Works of the Learned, Gentleman’s Journal, and Athenian Mercury.