Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

look into the darkest confines of human behavior. Its content was considered to be
simultaneously immoral and blasphemous and was perceived to transgress the moral
boundaries of society, which, coupled with the accepted conventions of authorship and
readership, created a considerable amount of controversy. In an atmosphere of great
turmoil and cultural change, the novel was considered subversive, for some thought that
it would entice individuals to act similarly and to question established codes of civic
behavior and certain forms of institutional power.
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126
In his introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, Greenblatt
advances a view of literary text that sees in it “the power to subvert” (“Introduction”
2252), a perspective he shares with the likes of Paul Lauter, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix
Guattari (61-65, 170), as has been explained in the previous chapters. The notion that
literature contains the potential to influence people’s thoughts and behavior, even to
prompt them to take social action, was also common at the dawn of the nineteenth
century, when various sources identified that the French revolution had been heralded
and/or echoed in works of social criticism. As mentioned earlier, contemporary
authorities viewed the activity of reading novels solely for the purpose of entertainment
as threatening for two reasons. For one, the patriarchy felt that it offered women—a class
that was enjoying a wider access to literacy—a way to escape domestic rule (Richter
115); and secondly, it raised the obvious moral objection that it would influence young
people to mimic the conduct depicted in the novels (116). In a time of growing fin de
siècle anxieties, there was growing fear that the Gothic’s elevation of individual desires
over social conventions, and private ambition over public duties, would inspire a