Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto
- Chapter 2 The Loyalist Gothic romance
- Chapter 3 Gothic ‘subversion’: German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis
- Chapter 4 The first poetess of romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe
- Chapter 5 The field of romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Chapter 5 - The field of romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto
- Chapter 2 The Loyalist Gothic romance
- Chapter 3 Gothic ‘subversion’: German literature, the Minerva Press, Matthew Lewis
- Chapter 4 The first poetess of romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe
- Chapter 5 The field of romance: Walter Scott, the Waverley novels, the Gothic
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
In 1813, before the appearance of Waverley, if anyone should have ventured to predict that a writer would arise, who, when every conceivable form of composition seemed not only to have been tried, but exhausted, should be the creator of one hitherto unknown, and which, in its immediate popularity, should exceed all others – who, when we fancied we had drained to its last drop the cup of intellectual excitement, should open a spring, not only new and untasted but apparently deep and inexhaustible – that he should exhibit his marvels in a form of composition the least respected in the whole circle of literature, and raise the Novel to a place among the highest productions of human intellect – his prediction would have been received, not only with incredulity, but with ridicule
Edinburgh Review, 1832[Scott] was no genius, merely, as an inspection of Mrs Radcliffe's novels shows, another Mrs Radcliffe. So he put his novels together in the easiest way, and his originality consisted in finding new backgrounds to set off the old conventions, as hers had been
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, 1932The previous chapters in this book have argued that the Gothic romance is a hybrid genre, its diverse affiliations best understood by way of detailed case studies of authors, works, and publishing events, and via a focus on the kinds of classification made by contemporary critics and reviewers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contesting the GothicFiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832, pp. 130 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999