Review: Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995)

[truepenny]

The Rise of the Gothic Novel by Maggie Kilgour

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Literary criticism, focused carefully on the Gothic from Caleb Williams to Frankenstein. Kilgour is interested in the way the books are talking to each other, particularly, in one strand, The Monk to The Mysteries of Udolpho, and then---Radcliffe's rebuttal---The Italian to The Monk. In the other strand she's interested in how Frankenstein reflects both on Godwin's Gothics and on Maria, the Gothic that Mary Wollstonecraft left unfinished at her death, and how those influences are tangled up in the biographical elements and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's experiences as the daughter of a famous philosopher (i.e., Godwin) and the wife of a famous poet. And in all of it, Kilgour is interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the Gothic, from Burke to Godwin to Rousseau. Her organizing idea is that the Gothic genre is always talking about itself---this is clearest in Frankenstein, where the monster as the (hideous) child of Frankenstein is directly parallel to the novel as the (hideous?) child of MWS.

This is densely written, but not theory-heavy---unless you count the theories of the philosophers she's interested in. The next time I teach Frankenstein, I may have my students read her chapter on it, because her reading certainly helped me structure my thinking about the novel.




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