During the last decades of the eighteenth century, England found itself in the midst of a societal unravelling. The philosophies of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith and David Hume, which for most of the century had provided the intellectual classes with theories of action and motivation that justified their self-interested behaviour, began to reveal themselves as insupportable. The contradiction between the English ideology in which individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity and actual economic and political conditions began to surface. Incidents like the Gordon riots in 1780 (as well as the utterly terrifying reality of complete Revolution just across the Channel) revealed a rupture in what had been thought of as the time and place of the "well-bred gentleman".
It is out of
this social climate that the Gothic novel grew: a new and fearful genre
for a new and fearful time. The spectre of social revolution is manifest
in the supernatural "spectres" of the Gothic: a crumbling way of life emerges
as a crumbling and haunted Gothic manor, the loss of English social identity
becomes the Gothic hero or heroine's search for identity. The Gothic is
often critized or even dismissed for its overly melodramatic scenarios
and utterly predictable plots, but the incredible popularity of the genre
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the "comeback"
of gothic narratives within the past two decades, points to a resiliance
that cannot be overlooked.
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