A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic. Anna Mostowska Reads Ann Radcliffe (original) (raw)

2018

This book fills the gap in research of the early stages of literary Gothicism and examines its transfer from England, via French, to Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The focus is on the oeuvre of Anna Mostowska, the first professional female writer of the Gothic in the region, and the extent to which it was shaped both by local literary tradition and political circumstances, and by Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe. This volume aims to redraw the maps of early Gothic by providing new insights into our understanding of the routes and meaning of its cross-cultural dissemination.

The Gothic genre: significant contribution to literary or cultural histories?

Genres such as the Gothic have often been dismissed as having no literary or cultural value, but this is not entirely true. Critic Robert Miles has argued that ‘Gothic romances echo the cultural convulsions that increasingly racked’ the period they were written in. This is not only true for Gothic novels in general, but it gains special relevance when applied to Ann Radcliffe. Her novel, The Italian, echoes cultural anxieties such as gender issues and religious tumults, constituting a solid example of how the Gothic can make a contribution to the understanding of society. The question that should be asked, therefore, is: why has the Gothic been diminished in relation to other genres? The aim of this essay is to answer this question, and to demonstrate the true importance of the Gothic genre by analysing Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and its portrayal of religious institutions.

Historicising the Gothic Other

World and Word, 2019

The following review discusses the recent book by Marie Mulvey-Roberts,<br> Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester UP, 2016), which<br> offers a historical perspective on gothic literary and cultural texts. In the book,<br> Mulvey-Roberts examines how gothic fiction represents the bodies of the Other<br> – the Catholic, the slave, the woman, the Jew, and so on – on which the history<br> cannibalistically feeds itself; a meticulous historical research allows her to shed<br> new light on both canonical as well as more marginal gothic texts. This review offers<br> an overview and a brief comment on this significant addition to gothic studies.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.