The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785-1829

This book constitutes the first sustained analysis that comprehensively proves that revision is required of the critical commonplace idea in Gothic scholarship that the roots of the Gothic novel should be seen within a late eighteenth century popular anti-Catholicism. Whereas scholarship has always maintained that the Catholic motifs contained in Gothic novels (monks, nuns, abbeys, confessionals) signify anti-Catholic prejudice and anti-Church subversiveness on the part of the author and his/her audience, this study argues that the Gothic was neither anti-Catholic nor anti-Church, and that England was much more sympathetic towards Catholicism during the long eighteenth century - particularly during and immediately after the French Revolution - than has previously been supposed. As well as discussing several new Gothic texts within this context, this study unveils the extent of English appreciation of Catholicism - often represented by an appropriation of Catholic aesthetics - and the French Catholic ‘sentimental’ origins of many of Gothic’s supposedly ‘diabolically dissident’ themes and motifs. The book tus brings to light many new aspects both of the Gothic genre and of an important era in British history.