T. J. Horsley Curties and Royalist Gothic: The Case of The Monk of Udolpho (1807)

Citation

Townshend D (2008) T. J. Horsley Curties and Royalist Gothic: The Case of The Monk of Udolpho (1807). Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, (4). http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/HorsleyCurtiesGothic.html

Abstract
First paragraph: One of the greatest sources of pleasure for any scholar of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic writing must surely be the extraordinary potential that the field bears for acts of literary-critical exhumation. Indeed, if the corpus of early Gothic fiction is metaphorically conceived as a grave-yard, then so much scholarly, editorial and critical activity in this, our critical Gothic hey-day, amounts to a plundering of its dusty tombs, a stealthy opening up of its crypts and a wilful conjuring of its most elusive ghosts. As if under the powers of a strange Frankensteinean compulsion, small, independent publishing houses-Valancourt Books; (2) Zittaw Press (3) -seek to reassemble, piecemeal, the early canon's lost body-parts and set the lumbering Gothic monster back in motion; extensive data-bases of rare Gothic material- Eighteenth-Century Collections Online; (4) Adam Matthew microfilms of the Sadleir-Black collection (5) -lend to largely obscure and forgotten texts and writers a ghostly digital presence. And yet, the spoils of Gothic grave-robbing are often meagre, frequently bringing to light so many second-rate romances, dramas and chapbooks that seem more to confirm than seriously challenge critical assumptions regarding the aesthetic and generic ascendancy of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis in the period.

Journal
Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 4