Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

historical value was intensively scrutinized for it was considered potentially to have
pernicious effects on its reading public and society at large:
Taking up already-established arguments against romance reading
that existed for over a century, reviewers began to single out
historical romances as particularly mischievous because of their
combination of supernaturalism and historicity, condemning them
as threatening civil society either by eroding the standards of
truthfulness necessary to maintain it, or by infantilizing its
members and rendering them less enlightened and more susceptible
to tyranny. (Gamer 60)
Gamer draws from an another article on fiction in the Monthly Review (2nd series, 10
(1793), 293) to observe that, according to the reviewer, “a piece of fiction can only claim
success and therefore a legitimate reason for existing, if it can demonstrate extensive and
productive knowledge of human nature” and that “such knowledge resides typically in a
mature, experienced, and, in most cases, masculine mind much like the reviewer’s” (36).
Even though Bataille’s ideas regarding the enslaving properties of productivity and order
as explained in Chapter One would make for an effective counter-argument to the first
observation from the Monthly Review cited by Gamer above, the most striking is that this
type of sexist review was not an isolated case, there was a clearly voiced antagonism
against fiction and especially, Gothic fiction because both its authorship and readership
were believed to be typically female and/or immature. Gamer notes that this “gendering”
of Gothic authors and readers was at times pushed to the extreme by referring to a review
where the anonymous female critic assumed the position of a male reviewer and
compared a male author of Gothic fiction (James Thomson) to “female writers” (36-7).
103
The Gothic is particularly susceptible to the initial attacks made on the novel’s
potential “danger” to uneducated readers because of the emerging genre’s lack of “truth”