The last three decades of the 18th century saw a great amount of new fiction written and published in England. The novel had risen at the beginning of the century to respond to the needs of culture and education of the new ascending social class: the bourgeoisie. A new sensibility was now spreading and , though the audience was still made up of upper and middle-class readers, the novelists offered a great variety of new genres rooted in and indebted to the previous production of Richardson, Fielding or Sterne but different and original in many ways
If you have a look at the chart below, you’ll immediately realize that the major representatives of the three main kinds of novel wrote or published more or less in the same years.
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS
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THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
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1764
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Horace Walpole, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO
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1794
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Ann Radcliffe, THE MISTERIES OF UDOLPHO
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1795
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Jane Austen writes ELINOR AND MARIANNE, first epistolary edition of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
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1796
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Matthew Lewis, THE MONK
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1797
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Ann Radcliffe, THE ITALIAN
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Jane Austen finishes PRIDE AND PREJUDICE but it is refused by publishers
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1798
| Jane Austen writes NORTHANGER ABBEY, a parody of Gothic novels | ||
1811
| Jane Austen publishes SENSE AND SENSIBLILITY | ||
1813
| Jane Austen publishes PRIDE AND PREJUDICE | ||
1814
| J.A. publishes MANSFIELD PARK |
Walter Scott publishes WAVERLEY
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1816
| Mary Shelley starts writing FRANKENSTEIN |
Jane Austen publishes EMMA
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1818
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Mary Shelley publishes FRANKENSTEIN
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Jane Austen’s brother publishes her sister’s PERSUASION and NORTHANGER ABBEY in one volume posthumously (J.A. died 1817)
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1819
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Walter Scott publishes IVANHOE
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Historical background
- The last three decades of the 18th century or the Age of the Revolutions:
1. The Industrial and the Agrarian Revolutions
2. The American War for Independence (1775 – 1783)
3. The French Revolution (1789)
- The Regency Era
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) |
Both Jane Austen and Walter Scott were read and admired by the Prince Regent who wanted to meet them (in separate moments!). Austen’s EMMA was dedicated to him.
B. THE ORIGINS OF THE GOTHIC TASTE - A NEW CONCEPTION OF BEAUTY
A new taste for the desolate, the love of ruins, graveyards, ancient castles and abbeys, was part of a revival of interest in a past perceived as contrasting with the present reality. The rediscovery of the art, architecture, legends and popular traditions of the Middle Ages manifested itself in the “Gothic”, which was no longer synonymous with barbarity, but became a facet of exoticism.
The Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume(1711-1776) denied the objectivity of experience as stated by Locke and wrote: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty”.
Joseph Addison, in his journal The Spectator, made the distinction between beauty and sublime, which became a main theme in the 19th century aesthetics. The most interesting development of this idea can be found in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful (1756-59).
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781) |
This “horrible beauty” identified by Burke gave aesthetic dignity to anything ugly existing in nature, and affected late 18th century literature. The taste for obscurity, terror and introspection became the distinguishing feature of the Gothic novel.
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