Having con?rmedthat there was a Gothic craze during the 1790s, we cannow ask, further, why did it happen? Once again literary history provides uswith a piece of received wisdom:the Gothic explosion was collateral damage from the French Revolution. The most famous version of this opinioncomes from the Marquis de Sade, who argued that the Gothic novels of Radcliffe and Lewis were “the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremorsfelt by the whole of Europe.”3 According to Sade’s view, the bloody horrors of the revolution pushednovelists to new extremes of imaginary violence, as they strove to compete with the shocking reality. William Hazlitt’sway of putting matters strikes me as more balanced. Radcliffe’s romances“derived part of their interest, no doubt, from the supposed tottering stateof all oldstructures at the time.”4 Equating the Gothic with the FrenchRevolution was a contemporary, rather than a retrospective phenomenon,as we can see from the currency of the smearingpun “the terrorist systemof novel writing” employedby reviewers during the latter half of the 1790s(Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction, pp. 147–48). The reviewers knew fullwell that Gothic terror derived from the Burkean cult of the sublime, as theDissenting critic Anna LaetitiaAikin famously explainedin her essay, “Onthe Pleasure Derivedfrom Objects of Terror.” The recourse to the sublimeadopted by Radcliffe and her school was partly a desire to exploit contemporary aesthetic fashions andpartly an attempt to pitch their work towardthe high endof the literary market, for sublimity andterror were associated with tragedy and epic, the two most prestigious literary forms – a strategy that would later pay off handsomely for William Wordsworth. By linkingBurke’s terror with Robespierre’s in the limitedcase of romances by womenwriters, critics strippedthe Gothic of its high literary pretensions, implicitly accusing its authors of being social incendiaries, while ?guring themas literary sansculottes: in other words, as a semiliterate mob. One needsto be careful about overstating the case. The adjective “terrorist” smeared,but it also condescended by making “terror” writers the object of a risiblepun. The smear worked, not because writers of “hobgoblin romance” weredangerous, but because they palpably were not.
这个就是JJ里面的第一段。但是分了三段来考。熟读熟读啊大家！
-- by 会员 xiaxiaqin (2011/12/19 14:05:44)
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发表于 2011-12-19 14:27:41
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