Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

egarding cultural and political ideologies while allowing the Gothic to take on the
alluring color of the exotic and the dangerous.
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In his book, Gamer explores the ways in which writers that belong to the tradition
of Romanticism “exploited the vogues for Gothic fiction and drama in vexed and
complex ways.” On the one hand, as will be explained later, Gamer refers to how the
Romantics borrowed extensively from the Gothic in their own writing, and on the other,
he argues that the two are interconnected in ways where they defined each other either
contributively or antagonistically:
the reception of Gothic writing—its institutional and commercial
recognition as a kind of literature—played a fundamental role in
shaping many of the ideological assumptions about high culture
that we have come to associate with romanticism. (2)
With regard to high cultural discourses, the Gothic was quickly superseded as it was
marginalized by the leaders of the literary scene of the late eighteenth-early nineteenth
century, who aligned themselves with the “romantic ideology,” which represents,
according to Gamer, “a set of writerly decisions about literary value, usually politically
derived and articulated either formally or generically” (6). Gamer perceives this ideology
as a “response” to Gothic writing, which pinpointed the Gothic as a “low” genre “against
which romantic writers could oppose themselves” (7) by arguing that the sensationalism
and the immense commercial popularity of the Gothic were characteristics of its
contemptible and low nature.
As the champions of the nascent “romantic ideology” with regard to taste and
cultural value, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge played a major role in
the critical discourses surrounding the reception of the Gothic. In the 1800 Preface to