Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel

by David H. Richter

In this vigorous response to recent trends in theory and criticism, David H. Richter asks how we can again learn to practice literary history. Despite the watchword "always historicize," comparatively few monographs attempt genuine historical explanations of literary phenomena. Richter theorizes that the contemporary evasion of history may stem from our sense that the modern literary ideas underlying our historical explanations - Marxism, formalism, and reception theory - are unable, by themselves, to inscribe an adequate narrative of the origins, development, and decline of genres and style systems. Despite theorists' attempts to incorporate others principles of explanation, each of these master narratives on its own has areas of blindness and areas of insight, questions it can answer and questions it cannot even ask. But the explanations, however differently focused, complement one another, with one supplying what another lacks. Using the first heyday of the Gothic novel as the prime object of study, Richter develops his pluralistic vision of literary history in practice. Successive chapters outline first a neo-Marxist history of the Gothic, using the ideas of Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton to understand the literature of terror as an outgrowth of inexorable tensions within Georgian society; next, a narrative on the Gothic as an institutional form, drawn from the formalist theories of R. S. Crane and Ralph Rader; and finally a study of the reception of the Gothic - the way the romance was sustained by, and in its turn altered, the motives for literary response in the British public around the turn of the nineteenth century. In his concluding chapter, Richter returns to the question of theory, to general issues of adequacy and explanatory power in literary history, to the false panaceas of Foucauldian new historicism and cultural studies, and to the necessity of historical pluralism. A learned, engaging, and important book. The Progress of Romance is esse

Genres: Gothic, Literary Criticism

242 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read little academic criticism, but I enjoyed Richter's book and found it helpful as a guide to understanding the development of the Gothic in literature.

How could such a revolutionary genre perish in less than three generations, and yet still leave its mark everywhere around us in the two centuries since its death? Richter responds to this question--and others--with valuable insights, and, although he makes extensive use of the academic vocabulary of literary studies, he does so to make his thoughts more precise and his expression of them more economical, not--as many academics regrettably do--to conceal the fact that they have virtually no thoughts at all.

Richter sees the origin of the Gothic genre in the novel of sentiment derived from Richardson's "Pamela," in which--in classic form-the woman is central and the "hero" is both her potential rapist and her potential husband. The movement of society toward greater civility in the 18th century (including the influence of the sentimental novel itself, particularly on its typically female audience) eventually made such a hero intolerable to its readers. Consequently, the Gothic narrative--an early form of the historical novel which searched for sublime sentiments in foreign landscapes and ancient ruins--split the Richardsonian hero in two: a villain who menaces the heroine and a lover who saves her (or for whom she saves herself.) This split solved the problem of maintaining a sympathetic female readership for the novel, but it also damaged narrative unity, creating an instability in the genre which prepared the ground for its eventual demise, a death hastened when Sir Walter Scott's more political and martial approach to the historical novel offered a more "masculine" alternative.

Although the Gothic disappears as a distinct genre in the 1820's, it persists to this day as a mode, placing its unique stamp on many popular genres, including the sensation novel, the adventure novel, science fiction, the detective story, the tale of horror, and the "bodice ripper" romance--to name just a few. For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of this book is the seventh chapter, "Ghosts of the Gothic," in which Richter follows the spectre of the Gothic through two hundred years of literary history.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a somewhat odd book, in that it's less about the Gothic novel than it is about literary historiography, and gives itself license to cover a lot of ground. The first 50 pages are an overview of literary studies. I'm not kidding. There's a summary of formalism, marxism, and reader response theory, and the problems of each approach. The next chapter describes two new (well, they were new then) approaches to the gothic and why they don't work. Chapter 4 is in some sense the main argument - Richter describes this theory that all Gothic novels are in some sense descendents of Pamela, except splitting Mr B into two characters (good guy and villain), and these adaptations make it kind of incoherent. I don't entirely agree with him, but it's an interesting argument. The next chapter kind of rehashes arguments made by E J Clery and Ina Ferris, about how the Gothic signals (or creates) a new form of reading. Chapter 6 brazenly tours Gothıc legacies in Victorian and even 20th century fiction. The final chapter returns to the literary historiography question, picking on new historicism a bit, and is decidedly less impressive somehow than the rest of the book.

Overall, it's definitely an interesting read (if you're working on the gothic novel) and worthwhile, but feels much more like a survey of the field than a contribution to it.