Ann Radcliffe

This novel, although not as well-known as Radcliffe's later works, is thought to represent her work at its best. More than just a work of suspense and mystery, it is a work of ideas--a discussion of the contrasts between hedonistic doctrines and a system of education and values.

Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation.

The English Gothic novel has recently attracted renewed attention by modern critics who have argued its importance as a mirror of late 18th-century discomfort with the political, psychological, and sexual climate of the times. Elizabeth Napier's work challenges these views, suggesting that the instability of the form may be more successfully addressed through a study of generic structure and its relationship to the designs of the fictional works that preceded it. The first full-length study of narrative conventions in the Gothic, The Failure of Gothic examines the disjunctive form of much Gothic fiction, and its repeated, troubling failure to deal conclusively with both the ethical and the formal issues it raises.

This historically grounded account of Gothic fiction takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterized at times by antagonistic relations between writers or works. Watt examines the novels' political import and concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and perceptions of the Gothic as a monolithic tradition, which continue to exert a powerful hold.

In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Wolfram Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyze the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction. His study argues that such descriptions are important to the British imagination of community. By making visible what it means to own something, they illuminate how competing concepts of property define the boundaries of the individual, of social community, and of political systems. In this way, Schmidgen recovers description as a major feature of eighteenth-century prose, and he makes his case across a wide range of authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Ann Radcliffe. The book's most incisive theoretical contribution lies in its careful insistence on the unity of the human and the material: in Schmidgen's argument, persons and things are inescapably entangled. This approach produces fresh insights into the relationship between law, literature, and economics.

Mark Canuel examines the way that Romantic poets, novelists and political writers criticized the traditional religious conformity of British political unity. Canuel reveals how writers (including Jeremy Bentham, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Lord Byron) undermined the validity of religion in the British state, and envisioned a tolerant and more organized mode of social inclusion and protection. He asserts that these writers considered their works to be political and literary commentaries on religious toleration.

This collection of essays focuses on sub-genres of the novel form that evolved during the end of the century. These were novels -- frequently written by women -- that reflect the intersections between literature and popular culture.

With its roots in Romanticism, antiquarianism, and the primacy of the imagination, the Gothic genre originated in the 18th century, flourished in the 19th, and continues to thrive today. This reference work provides an introduction to Gothic literature and its abundant criticism and summarizes contemporary developments and critical opinion in Gothic Studies. The volume includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 50 Gothic writers from Horace Walpole to Stephen King. Each entry includes a primary bibliography, a critical essay on the author's place in the Gothic tradition, and a selected, annotated bibliography of scholarship. Entries for Russian, Japanese, French, and German writers give an international scope to the book, while the focus on English and American literature shows the dynamic nature of Gothicism today.