The Typographical Gothic: A Cautionary Note on the Title Page to Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

Abstract

The “rise of the gothic” in the late eighteenth century is a truism and would seem to require less in the way of evidentiary support than mere confi rmation. While we may not all agree on precisely what “the gothic” or “the Gothic” is any more than we might agree on precisely what we mean by “the sublime,” we presume that the lack of precision in such terms does not invalidate them. After all, our use of the term gothic is not entirely arbitrary, since we fi nd that word used in the texts of the late eighteenth century we consider central to literary study: Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance and Thomas Warton’s History of English Literature. The gothic is, and there’s an end on’t. It is not the purpose of this paper to off er a new defi nition of the gothic nor to critique those that already exist. Rather we will consider how material bibliographical evidence — features of particular books — been deployed in support of these terms. Is it legitimate, or advisable, to raise to the level of a text’s meaning those bibliographical and material features of the book, namely its format, layout, and typography, that until the late twentieth century were generally considered extra-textual? 1