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 I
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Gothic in/and History
- 1.1 The Goths in Ancient History
- 1.2 The Term ‘Gothic’ in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680‒1800
- 1.3 The Literary Gothic Before Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
- 1.4 Gothic Revival Architecture Before Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill
- 1.5 Horace Walpole and the Gothic
- 1.6 Shakespeare’s Gothic Transmigrations
- 1.7 Reassessing the Gothic/Classical Relationship
- 1.8 ‘A World of Bad Spirits’: The Terrors of Eighteenth-Century Empire
- 1.9 In Their Blood: The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Stage
- 1.10 Domestic Gothic Writing after Horace Walpole and before Ann Radcliffe
- 1.11 Early British Gothic and the American Revolution
- 1.12 Gothic and the French Revolution, 1789–1804
- 1.13 The Aesthetics of Terror and Horror: A Genealogy
- 1.14 Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
- 1.15 The Gothic Novel Beyond Radcliffe and Lewis
- 1.16 Oriental Gothic: Imperial-Commercial Nightmares from the Eighteenth Century to the Romantic Period
- 1.17 The German ‘School’ of Horrors: A Pharmacology of the Gothic
- 1.18 Gothic and the History of Sexuality
- 1.19 Gothic Art and Gothic Culture in the Romantic Era
- 1.20 Time in the Gothic
- Select Bibliography
- Index
1.20 - Time in the Gothic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 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 I
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Gothic in/and History
- 1.1 The Goths in Ancient History
- 1.2 The Term ‘Gothic’ in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680‒1800
- 1.3 The Literary Gothic Before Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
- 1.4 Gothic Revival Architecture Before Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill
- 1.5 Horace Walpole and the Gothic
- 1.6 Shakespeare’s Gothic Transmigrations
- 1.7 Reassessing the Gothic/Classical Relationship
- 1.8 ‘A World of Bad Spirits’: The Terrors of Eighteenth-Century Empire
- 1.9 In Their Blood: The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Stage
- 1.10 Domestic Gothic Writing after Horace Walpole and before Ann Radcliffe
- 1.11 Early British Gothic and the American Revolution
- 1.12 Gothic and the French Revolution, 1789–1804
- 1.13 The Aesthetics of Terror and Horror: A Genealogy
- 1.14 Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
- 1.15 The Gothic Novel Beyond Radcliffe and Lewis
- 1.16 Oriental Gothic: Imperial-Commercial Nightmares from the Eighteenth Century to the Romantic Period
- 1.17 The German ‘School’ of Horrors: A Pharmacology of the Gothic
- 1.18 Gothic and the History of Sexuality
- 1.19 Gothic Art and Gothic Culture in the Romantic Era
- 1.20 Time in the Gothic
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter uses the work of Charles Taylor to frame the way in which time operates in the early Gothic. Taylor follows Friedrich Schiller in describing the cleavage between the modern and pre-modern worlds as the difference between ‘naïve’ enchantment and ‘sentimental’ disenchantment (‘radical reflexivity’, as Taylor terms it). Enchanted subjectivity was ‘porous’, meaning that the self had no defences beyond magic to regulate against animistic intrusions. Modern subjectivity, by contrast, is ‘buffered’. For Taylor, the Romantic period was that moment in which the process of disenchantment completed itself as a widely accepted, scarcely noted, norm. From across the unbridgeable divide of radical reflexivity, Gothic writers imagine encounters with an enchanted world where time is represented either as ‘kairotic knots’ affording glimpses into higher times that radically shift the subjectivity of the protagonist, or as senseless repetitions undermining the linear logic of modern character development. The chapter demonstrates how this dynamic plays out in three canonical Gothic texts: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Gottfried Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ and S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’.
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- The Cambridge History of the GothicVolume 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century, pp. 426 - 449Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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