Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Gothic
- The Cambridge History of the Gothic
- The Cambridge History of the Gothic
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations and Captions for Volume II
- Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, 1800–1900
- 2.1 Gothic Romanticism and the Summer of 1816
- 2.2 Fantasmagoriana: The Cosmopolitan Gothic and Frankenstein
- 2.3 The Mutation of the Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Gothic
- 2.4 From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877
- 2.5 Nineteenth-Century Gothic Architectural Aesthetics: A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris
- 2.6 Gothic Fiction, from Shilling Shockers to Penny Bloods
- 2.7 The Theatrical Gothic in the Nineteenth Century
- 2.8 ‘Spectrology’: Gothic Showmanship in Nineteenth-Century Popular Shows and Media
- 2.9 The Gothic in Victorian Poetry
- 2.10 The Genesis of the Victorian Ghost Story
- 2.11 Charles Dickens and the Gothic
- 2.12 Victorian Domestic Gothic Fiction
- 2.13 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Spain
- 2.14 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Italy
- 2.15 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Scotland
- 2.16 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
- 2.17 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century America
- 2.18 Nineteenth-Century British and American Gothic and the History of Slavery
- 2.19 Genealogies of Monstrosity: Darwin, the Biology of Crime and Nineteenth-Century British Gothic Literature
- 2.20 Gothic and the Coming of the Railways
- 2.21 Gothic Imperialism at the Fin de siècle
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2.4 - From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2020
- The Cambridge History of the Gothic
- The Cambridge History of the Gothic
- The Cambridge History of the Gothic
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations and Captions for Volume II
- Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, 1800–1900
- 2.1 Gothic Romanticism and the Summer of 1816
- 2.2 Fantasmagoriana: The Cosmopolitan Gothic and Frankenstein
- 2.3 The Mutation of the Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Gothic
- 2.4 From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877
- 2.5 Nineteenth-Century Gothic Architectural Aesthetics: A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris
- 2.6 Gothic Fiction, from Shilling Shockers to Penny Bloods
- 2.7 The Theatrical Gothic in the Nineteenth Century
- 2.8 ‘Spectrology’: Gothic Showmanship in Nineteenth-Century Popular Shows and Media
- 2.9 The Gothic in Victorian Poetry
- 2.10 The Genesis of the Victorian Ghost Story
- 2.11 Charles Dickens and the Gothic
- 2.12 Victorian Domestic Gothic Fiction
- 2.13 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Spain
- 2.14 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Italy
- 2.15 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Scotland
- 2.16 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
- 2.17 The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century America
- 2.18 Nineteenth-Century British and American Gothic and the History of Slavery
- 2.19 Genealogies of Monstrosity: Darwin, the Biology of Crime and Nineteenth-Century British Gothic Literature
- 2.20 Gothic and the Coming of the Railways
- 2.21 Gothic Imperialism at the Fin de siècle
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter discusses the continuities and contrasts between ‘Romantic Gothic’ and ‘Victorian medievalism’, focusing on the figures of Robert Southey and William Morris. Bringing together the perspectives developed in Morris’s conservationist activities with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and his utopian romance, and Southey’s ‘black letter’ works of 1817, it argues for the early and late nineteenth-century presence of an alternative ‘history of the Gothic’. This is Gothic as what Morris called a ‘style historic’, articulated either side of the 1840s and the rise of historicism in architecture and ‘medievalism’ in literature. Where Morris ultimately chose a harder-edged Nordic ‘Gothic’ over the ‘maundering medievalism’ of Tennyson and Rossetti, Southey consistently avoided the category, despite being present at its inception with his review of the 1817 work in which the word ‘medieval’ first appeared. Revising received critical and semantic histories of ‘Gothic’ being subsumed by the medieval, the chapter explores the articulation and the ongoing significance of a more granular, aphasic and rhizomatic approach to the art and culture of the Middle Ages.
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- The Cambridge History of the Gothic , pp. 85 - 117Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020