Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 by James Uden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 by James Uden Giles Whiteley James Uden, Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 284. $74.00 cloth. Good scholarly books sometimes seek not only to add to what we know about any given subject, but also to radically reconfigure the supposed knowns of this subject. James Uden's Spectres of Antiquity is one such book. Founded on what initially seems like a counter-intuitive inspiration, Uden asks us to re-conceive our understanding of the origins of the Gothic as less a reaction to, than a reconfiguration of, the classical heritage. In the mode of all good Gothicists, Uden unearths the repressed kernel at the core of his subject, but in this case it is the surprising revelation that the Gothic does not seek to exorcise the "spectres" of the classics and the classical past, but rather mines and relies upon a subterranean vault of classical sources, creatively reworking them. The results of Uden's labors are striking, and it is not hyperbole to say that Spectres of Antiquity will be essential reading to all who are interested in the origins of the Gothic or to the history of classical reception in the eighteen and early nineteenth centuries. The story of the origins of the Gothic that Uden calls into question is much rehearsed. When Horace Walpole republished The Castle of Otranto in a second edition, he included a famous preface which figured the "Gothic Story" (the new subtitle) as the blending of two kinds of "romance," ancient and modern. The model for this Gothic was an English-language literary tradition of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, one which emphasized the power of "fancy," rather than the classical authors which many of Walpole's contemporaries were openly emulating. His defense of the genre was accompanied by an attack on Voltaire, who had himself recently attacked Shakespeare for violating the "classical" laws of the Aristotelian dramatic unities. Walpole's Gothic then is supposedly founded on a suppression of the "classical" laws of order, reason, and decorum, in favor of a more English or "Gothic" value of imagination. [End Page 130] In this, Walpole's version of the Gothic seemed to chime with a contemporary reappraisal of the standing of the "Gothic" during the period. His literary experiments became part of a wider politico-cultural narrative, one expressed in the factional infighting of the Whig party during the immediate period of composition, and one which had claimed the career of Walpole's father, Prime Minister Robert Walpole. According to this view, the rise of interest in Gothic art and architecture during the middle of the eighteenth century was ultimately a question of nationalism: the new Gothicists of the period discovered in their subject an imagined culture of medieval northern Europe. In a moment of ahistorical bravura, this same spirit could be traced back to the supposedly emancipatory gestures of the sackings of Rome by the Goths, and teleologically read forward both to Henry VIII's break with Rome and to the development of parliamentary democracy after the Revolution. As such, the Gothic became a quintessentially Whiggish preoccupation. If this stretched the Gothic well beyond its historical borders, it also did the same with the classical, conflating ancient Rome with the Catholic Church, and the Goths, who were broadly based in Germany, with the English. Regardless, however, of the questionable historicism of the Gothicists of the period, battle lines were supposedly drawn: it was the Gothic contra classicism. In Spectres of Antiquity, Uden not only questions this eighteenth-century historicism; he also questions the ways in which literary historians have been a little bit too quick to buy this story. Indeed, as with all good counter-narratives, closer scrutiny reveals that what initially seems extraordinary is obvious when Uden has brought the facts to light. His argument is that a clear classical presence underwrites the Gothic, one which, in many cases, has been right before the reader's eyes. For instance, under the subtitle to Otranto, Walpole positions an epigraph from Horace, as Matthew Lewis positions a different epigraph from the same...