routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

The Gothic and the sublime
211
conceal my retreat. The fresh air revived me, and, with renewed
determination I approached the door of their cottage.
I knocked. Who is there?’ said the old man – ‘Come in’.
I entered; ‘Pardon this intrusion,’ said I, ‘I am a traveller in want
of a little rest; you would greatly oblige, if you would allow me
to remain a few minutes before the fire.’
Frankenstein was inspired, the story goes, by an evening which Mary
Shelley spent with the poets Byron and Shelley and their friend John
Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. All four of them were
to write something ‘supernatural’. Byron and Shelley incorporated the
ideas into poems. Polidori wrote The Vampire, published in 1818, a
story which started a long line of vampire tales in English.
A fashion for exotic locales and action, closely related to the Gothic,
led to such outrageous works as Vathek (1786) by William Beckford.
This ‘Arabian tale’ involves a cruel hero, Caliph Vathek, palaces for
the indulgence of the five senses, child sacrifice, and considerable
high-pitched excitement. Its exaggerations are tempered with a degree
of irony which make the book very funny, although many readers
and critics have taken its strangeness at face value. Vathek was the
precursor of many such oriental tales, and in some ways anticipates
the ‘aesthetic’ temperament which was to develop in Romanticism,
such as Lalla Rookh (1817), four hugely successful verse tales with a
linking narrative, by the Irish writer Thomas Moore.
Like the Gothic terrors, Beckford’s exoticism is more the product of
imagination and fantasy than of realism, an extension of the imaginative
range of the novel which brings together several trends: the fascination
of far-off places, the exaggerations of Mandeville and Hakluyt, and an
enjoyment of sensuality and sensation.
LANGUAGE NOTE
Point of view
As the form of the novel developed, so the uses of point of view became
more sophisticated. We see in Defoe’s novels, for example, all the action
through the eyes of the main character – Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders,