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1 - Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Barry Murnane
Affiliation:
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Andrew Cusack
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität Berlin
Barry Murnane
Affiliation:
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
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Summary

It is with an equal portion of surprise and alarm that we witness in this country, a glaring depravity of taste, as displayed in the extreme eagerness for foreign productions, and a systematic design to extend the depravity by regular importation of exotic poison from the envenomed crucibles of the literary and political alchymists of the new German school.

— John Boening, ed., The Reception of Classical German Literature in England, 1760–1860

As a literature fixated on uncanny disruptions to a seemingly stable order, it is more than ironic that the German Schauerroman has itself been widely ignored, perhaps even suppressed, by literary historians over the years. From the outset German literature occupied something of a privileged, albeit vilified position within the transnational framework of the gothic on the emerging literary market around 1800. For earliest critics in Britain such as Jane Austen or the Anti-Jacobin, gothic fiction was synonymous with an image of Germany as the depraved site of necromancy, secret societies, and wanton violence. When Austen completed Northanger Abbey in 1798, her parody of gothic novels contained not only Karl Friedrich Kahlert's The Necromancer and Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (original titles: Der Geisterbanner and Der Genius), her list of “horrid novels” extended to English works obviously hoping to profit from the German influx: Francis Lathom's supposed “German Story Founded on Incidents of Real Life” The Midnight Bell and Eliza Parsons's “German Story” Castle of Wolfenbach and her “German Tale” The Mysterious Warning.

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The German Gothic and its International Reception, 1800–2000
, pp. 10 - 43
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2012

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