Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Watt argues that the latter considered German works to be “corrosive of national virtue”
and that “German writers pandered to false taste by responding to demands of the
marketplace” (79). With regard to this last point of contention Gamer observes that
“consequently, we see Gothic writing in both periodical review and literary essay blamed
for various changes in literary production and consumption: originality to mass-
production; and the text-as-work to the text-as-commodity” (67). In retrospect, critical
reception of the Gothic provides for the first explicit representation of a conflict between
an “elite” and a “popular” view of literature as it pertains to critical discourses
surrounding canon-formation. The political changes and the social upheaval of the late
eighteenth century contributed to a dissolution of a sharply hierarchized society, while
the spread of literacy and the market conditions set the stage for a commercialization of
literature that some considered to have contributed to the vulgarization of taste of the
reading public, as well as the fragmentation of established class boundaries.
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This overview underlines how the Gothic novel was perceived as a low and
possibly subversive genre of literary production that threatened socio-cultural perceptions
of order during the late eighteenth century, a particularly sensitive period in history.
Reception to the early Gothic represents a paradox in which the text, its readership, and
the institutional forces that regulate its diffusion in a volatile geo-political context
intermingle in a convulsed series of cultural exchanges. The exchanges between
Romanticism and the Gothic are exemplary of high/low discourses, and more particularly
of how one is defined antagonistically with regard to the other. Based on his analysis of
both the Preface to and the poems of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Gamer argues that
they “illustrate the extent to which his preference for ‘high’ literary forms and