Early Gothic Novels and the Belief in Fiction

Abstract

This chapter looks at Gothic novels. A Gothic Romance or even ‘a Gothic Story’ may be one thing, but a Gothic Novel is something else again. Though that term has been retrospectively applied to a body of macabre, sensational, ghost-infested fiction from the late eighteenth century only since the early twentieth, in its suggestion of a perverse hybridizing of the outmoded and the up-to-date it aptly captures the transgressiveness these fictions represented for their original critics. More directly than the contemporary fictions that aspired to be life-like and observe the norms of probability, Gothic novels foreground that peculiar mental gymnastics that since the eighteenth century has enabled readers to participate in a secular culture industry ‘which invites the subtle and supple deployment of belief’. In this sense, by helping to define the frontiers of the fictive, the Gothic mode did not interrupt the rise of the novel, but instead completed it.