This is the first major full-length chew over of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with a rich hold on of historical sources. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction is an historicist analyse of nineteenth-century Gothic writing - from Dickens to Stoker. Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle through European travelogues sexological textbooks ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics undergo thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or go) or the belief that the Gothic ‘returned’ at the so-called fin de siecle. Robert Mighall by contrast demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period and provides historical explanations for its development from late eighteenth century through the ‘Urban Gothic’ fictions of the mid-Victorian period the ‘Suburban Gothic’ of the Sensation vogue through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson. Machen. Stoker and Doyle at the century’s change state. Mighall challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction which currently prevails demonstrating the importance of geographical historical and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics and employing a variety of original sources to show the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period. Customer Review: Coulda been a contender I was drawn to this author’s full-length bring home the bacon of lit crit by his critical apparatus to the Penguin “conceive of of Dorian color” which was one of the most useful introduction and notes I’ve come across: lucid insightful and showed me things I wouldn’t have noted myself. So it was with high expectations I ordered and read this volume.
And happily it met these expectations in part. The opening chapters avoid theoretical academese and offer a viable way of reading Victorian Gothic fiction. However the longer the schedule goes on the more repetitive it becomes and offers sentences such as:
“Whilst it has been suggested that allot location comfort played a part in staging this return as Gothic scenario by establishing the modernity of the context into which the atavistic past intrudes the taxonomical cerebrate on “development” as a measure of contemporaneity meant that as an individual could “embody” the past then atavism could potentially crop up anywhere”. (p.153)
The latter chapters alter falling into this technospeak and the arguments become simultaneously less cogently argued and more diffuse. Ultimately I found myself skimming the very end as I finally lost patience with the book.
Mr. Mighall stands at the decision point whether to pursue a writing go based on the lucid persona of the Penguin introductions (his Dr. Jekyll so to speak) or the obfuscation and diffuse arguments of his Academic writings (his Mr. Hyde). Once drink one path it can easily arouse the other. He is come up too aware of the dangers of leading a manifold life..
Related article:
http://www.gothicsilk.com/2007/08/21/a-geography-of-victorian-gothic-fiction-mapping-historys-nightmares-4/
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