Chapter Five focusses on another popular literary discourse, the Gothic, which emerged in the middle of the century and has sometimes been seen as a negative form of the sublime. Wright argues that it fuses various national and generic sources, troubling cultural boundaries and playing an important role in the development of Romantic literature despite its ‘terroristic’ association. Originating in European romance, the literary Gothic circulated around the continent via translations and free adaptations, making it difficult to identify specific sources. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek, for example, rely on a combination of often unattributed British and French texts, whereas Ann Radcliffe’s European reception shows the permeability of cultural boundaries and reveals a community of tastes bridging the Channel. Wright then discusses French and especially German Gothic works, which became increasingly popular during the French Revolution, including The Book of Spectres, which indirectly influenced the age’s best-known Gothic romance, Frankenstein. As the author shows, the Gothic fostered communities of readers that transcended national borders, escaping the nationalist labels reviewers had attributed as a way of dismissing the genre, and making it truly cosmopolitan despite its local differences.

Alison Milbank’s chapter on Gothic prose, ranging from Ann Radcliffe in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Gothic, shows how often language in these works verges on the inexpressible, reminding us that our rational understanding of human experience may only be partial. Language that superanimates the natural world, the frequent use of em dashes that gesture towards the unsaid, even the unsayable, grotesque and arabesque styles, and equivocal, combinatory techniques are all mobilised to create a set of effects that test the limits of our capacity for understanding.

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’.