Theorie De La Figure De La Terre, Tiree Des Principes De L'hydrostatique (French Edition)

Although it was almost thirty years before the Gothic novel achieved its greatest popularity, Walpole anticipated its full range of concerns and techniques for handling those concerns in his tour de force. -220- Of course, as Walpole himself may have understood, there is always more than authorial agency at work in the creation of literary genres. Various literary historians have attempted to pinpoint the origins of the Gothic novel. Antiquarian interest in Gothic architecture, changing popular tastes, frustration with "reason," new concepts of subjectivity and emotional response, including theories of "pleasurable terror" or the "sublime," the politics of individualism, the French Revolution-all these things have been posited, more or less successfully, as explanations for the emergence of the Gothic novel in the later eighteenth century. Walpole's paradigmatic text, however, provides a less circumstantial explanatory resource. The Castle of Otranto itself reveals the degree to which Gothic fiction provides the terms for its own analysis ...»