Abstract
This article examines two novels that parody popular, late eighteenth-century fiction: Mrs F.C. Patrick, More Ghosts! (1798) and Sarah Green, Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810). Both texts embrace and resist elements of gothic romance through intertextuality and generic instability. These two novels are marked by dynamic ambivalence: the writers overtly disavow the gothic genre, yet fail to abandon gothic sympathies for a consistent parody. Dynamic ambivalence empowers the reader to take multiple, conflicting positions within and against the plot. Both authors warn readers that in order to strengthen one’s mind, one must be insensible to melodrama and resist romantic extravagances; nevertheless, each exposes this stance as a façade. Using comic elements to deflect criticism and satire to establish their moral vision, Patrick and Green aim to elicit sympathy for female characters, even when they are foolish, deceived, or debauched. More Ghosts! and Romance Readers offer a cultural critique, embedded in parody, which challenges the contradictions inherent in women’s position in that era.
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