The Gothic novel (romance) Jane Austen

The Gothic novel/romance Peak: 1765–1820 Preceding literary and cultural phenomena: MacPherson, James. The Poems of Ossian Percy, Thomas. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry Horace Walpole: Strawberry Hill Graveyard poetry (Young, Hervey, Gray)

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757: ”Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible subjects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

Mary Shelley: Introduction to the 2nd (1831) edition of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus “I busied myself to think of a story – a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.”

A List of Gothic Novels Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story Reeve, Clara. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story Lee, Sophia. The Recess: or, A Tale of Other Times Beckford, William. Vathek Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian, or the Confessional of Black Penitents Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818/1831 Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. 1820

Jane Austen ( ) “A Lady” Even though: mid-18th c: – Samuel Johnson: „Amazons of the pen”; WH Auden: “You could not shock me more than she shocks me. Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable an English maiden of the middle class describe so ironically this ‘narrow world’.”

Austen: “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit down seriously to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at any other, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. I must keep to my own style and go on my way.” “Pictures of perfection make me sick.” Mary Wollstonecraft: sentimental novels “render women more artificial, weak characters than they would otherwise have been” novel of manners: descendent of Restauration comedy of manners ”cover story” vs. narratorial (ironic) distance

First sentences Northanger Abbey: – “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine.” Pride and Prejudice: – “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

William Blackstone, professor of law at Oxford “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french fem-covert.”

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929): “Towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.”

List of novels by Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility. (Elinor and Marianne). pb. 1811; (Értelem és érzelem) Pride and Prejudice. (First Impressions). pb. 1813; (Büszkeség és balítélet) Mansfield Park. pb. 1814; (A mansfieldi kastély) Emma. pb. 1815; (Emma) Northanger Abbey. (Susan) pb. 1818; (A Klastrom titka) Persuasion. pb. 1818; (Meggyőző érvek)

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