Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

formation are typically marshaled by the ideologies of the respective groups of
canonizers. In the 1790s and 1800s, the most pervasive ideology was that which was
operating under the tenets of early Romanticism. In his analysis of how the processes of
reception of the Gothic shape the production of Romantic texts, Gamer shows the ways in
which “[the] popular/critical dualism [of Romantic ideology] can operate in a culture
where individuals often occupy both halves of it simultaneously by reading, reviewing,
and writing Gothic texts” (25).
106
Another wave of ideological criticism was spurred by the traceable influence of
the German Shauer-Romantik (horror-Romantic) tradition in Lewis’ The Monk and other
novels that were inspired by Lewis’ example. As a matter of fact, Watt points out that
the term “‘German’ was much more current than ‘Gothic’ in the 1790s” (70). The import
of Germanic elements into national literature as pioneered by Lewis was regarded as an
“invasion” which degraded “the English Genius” (Watt 68). Although many Romantics
revered earlier German works, 12 Gothic works that were influenced by the Shauer-
Romantik emerged at a time of political upheaval and social uncertainty, where anything
foreign was dubbed suspicious. Watt refers to the Illuminati controversy of the end of the
century to point out that “a mythical Germany became associated with a deluded
revolutionary idealism, almost to the same extent as France, and ‘German’ fiction became
almost universally associated with a potentially dangerous excess” (68). In sum, the
ideological resistance to the Gothic was spurred not only by the fact that it prompted
certain shifts in the traditional literary conventions of purpose, audience, and reader-
response patterns, but also by its affiliations with more generally perceived threats
12 Coleridge, for example, praised the work of Schiller