Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

“dialogue,” rather a unilateral discourse based on assumptions that relied mostly on
stereotypes of gender (65).
105
This stigmatization of the Gothic audience contains a strong ideological bias that
aimed to regulate the production of literature by establishing distinct hierarchies. David
Richter uses Jauss’ theory of reader response to argue that the appearance of the Gothic
novel marked a shift in the pattern of reader response to literature:
The Gothic novel sits astride a major shift … a shift from catharsis
to aesthesis, or in basic English, a shift from reading for
information, and for the sake of entry into a verisimilar world
otherwise inaccessible to the reader, toward reading as an escape
from the world one inhabits into an inner site of fantasy. (112-113)
As briefly mentioned above, this shift in readership runs parallel to the division of the
literate faction of society into two separate castes: one, typically male and upper class,
reading for moral and/or social enlightenment and another, typically female, reading for
entertainment. The former caste included those institutional forces that subversively
regulated the circulation of novels through the function of criticism, it is easy to
understand why they typically rejected the novel as a canonical form of literature. Gamer
claims that the “stubbornness” of the reviewers against the Gothic was ideologically
biased and that their ultimate goal was to dismiss it as a valid form of high cultural
production in order to retain dominion on the cultural front:
As guardians of taste in a culture that privileges male over female
writers, poetry over prose, and learned and didactic over popular
literature, reviewers dismiss Gothic writing almost by definition,
since to countenance it is to undermine the very positions of
privilege from which they derive their authority. (42)
This observation echoes the observations made in the first chapter when Plato’s selection
process was deconstructed: critical discourses surrounding the processes of canon-