Manchester University Press
5 Europhobia
Abstract
Portraying a continent disfigured by the Inquisition, Jesuitical conspiracy, and mob violence, Charles Maturin's most famous novel has often been taken as the high-water mark of Gothic anti-Catholicism and Europhobia. Turning to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the prototype of Gothic romance, is the quickest way of taking one's generic bearings when discussing early Gothic. The tendency of the Shakespearian romance plot to come unstuck in the Gothic is attributable to the cultural ambivalence generated by the Glorious Revolution. The settlement that followed left Englishmen imaginatively suspended between Divine Right and the ancient constitution, or monarchy and abstract rights. The representation of the European other in early Gothic, is not part of a single binary of Protestant/Catholic, Briton/European, but a complex fabric 'haunted' by the issue of legitimacy inevitably provoked by the task of forging nations.
Abstract
Portraying a continent disfigured by the Inquisition, Jesuitical conspiracy, and mob violence, Charles Maturin's most famous novel has often been taken as the high-water mark of Gothic anti-Catholicism and Europhobia. Turning to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the prototype of Gothic romance, is the quickest way of taking one's generic bearings when discussing early Gothic. The tendency of the Shakespearian romance plot to come unstuck in the Gothic is attributable to the cultural ambivalence generated by the Glorious Revolution. The settlement that followed left Englishmen imaginatively suspended between Divine Right and the ancient constitution, or monarchy and abstract rights. The representation of the European other in early Gothic, is not part of a single binary of Protestant/Catholic, Briton/European, but a complex fabric 'haunted' by the issue of legitimacy inevitably provoked by the task of forging nations.
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of illustrations vii
- Notes on contributors ix
- Acknowledgements xii
- Introduction 1
- 1 Translation in distress 17
- 2 European disruptions of the idealized woman 39
- 3 Diderot and Maturin 55
- 4 Verging on the Gothic 71
- 5 Europhobia 84
- 6 European Gothic and nineteenth-century Russian literature 104
- 7 The robbers and the police 128
- 8 Translating Mary Shelley’s Valperga into English 147
- 9 ‘Hallelujah to your dying screams of torture’ 161
- 10 Potocki’s Gothic Arabesque 183
- 11 The Gothic crosses the Channel 204
- 12 ‘A detour of filthiness’ 230
- Index 252
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of illustrations vii
- Notes on contributors ix
- Acknowledgements xii
- Introduction 1
- 1 Translation in distress 17
- 2 European disruptions of the idealized woman 39
- 3 Diderot and Maturin 55
- 4 Verging on the Gothic 71
- 5 Europhobia 84
- 6 European Gothic and nineteenth-century Russian literature 104
- 7 The robbers and the police 128
- 8 Translating Mary Shelley’s Valperga into English 147
- 9 ‘Hallelujah to your dying screams of torture’ 161
- 10 Potocki’s Gothic Arabesque 183
- 11 The Gothic crosses the Channel 204
- 12 ‘A detour of filthiness’ 230
- Index 252
