Department of English

This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre--the Gothic. The study analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. The book shows not only how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology; it also considers larger questions of genre and reception by tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.