Gothics, ghosts, and and l'écriture-femme

A Sicilian Romance

and

The Romance of the Forest

by Ann Ward Radcliffe

From January through April 2004 a group of us on EighteenthCenturyWorlds@Yahoo began a reading and discussion of Ann Radcliffe's Romance of the Forst (1791). We were a small group: myself, Susanne, Judy Geater, Leslie Robertson, Dagny Wilson, Joan Wall. This was, however, not the only time I read and discussed this novel with other people online. So I also include other postings on this book which I and others wrote on other lists (including EighteenthCenturyNovels and Janeites, both @ Yahoo, C18-l, and Litalk-l) and Radcliffe's earlier successful female gothic, A Sicilian Romance. The interested reader will also find essay-postings by me on Rictor Norton's biography of her life, pictorialism, the sublime, and some of good criticism of the gothic genre (e.g., Coral Ann Howells's Love, Mystery and Misery, Elizabeth Napier's The Failure of the Gothic, Juliann Fleenor's The Female Gothic, Diane Long Hoeveler's Gothic Feminism, and Judith Wilt's Ghosts of the Gothic).

A Sicilian Romance

• "Terrific Energy Caught in Stillness"

The Romance of the Forest

• Jan 25: Introduction, Vol I, Chs 1-3: Introduction; A Stunning Opener; Inner Worlds; Friedrich's art; Criticism by Summers, Varma, Garber; Anticlericalism; Disjunction and Moral Lesson; A Ruin; Friedrich's Abbey in the Oakwood; A Review of Rictor Norton's Mistress of Udolpho; More Radcliffe Bibliography
  
• Feb 1: Vol I, Chs 4-5: Very rich; Like a Film; Obsessive Repetition Patterns; Young impressionable girls reading Radcliffe -- or Chastelay or Fournier?; Another reference to the influence of Radcliffe's "macabre" novels; Christopher Cave's essay on the Abbé André Morellet as an Enlightenment figure and his French translation of Radcliffe's Italian
  
• Feb 8: Vol I, Chs 6-7: A Series of Nightmares; Legends about Ann Radcliffe; Walpole and Nightmare; Adeline's Three Nightmares; Alienation and Scrutiny; The Waterfalls at Tivoli, 1737 by Vernet; Why does the novel no longer scare us?; "Prisons" by Piranesi and Reader Responses
• Feb 15: Vol II, Chs 8-10: Naturally, a manuscript; The Justifiably Paranoic Core; Fuseli's Midnight and Silence; Torn Manuscript; Illegible Story; Feeling of Doom; a Prison; La Motte & Johnson's Rambler No. 28; Romance of the Forest and Chastenay's French and Radcliffe's English Udolpho.
• Feb 22: Vol II, Chs 11-12: The Pavilion and Her Best Poem; LaMotte v the Marquis; Radcliffe and Scott; Radclffe and Medieval French Romance: Chretien de Troyes.
• Feb 29: Vol II, Chs 13-14: Emotionally Drenched Vocabulary: Obsessively Repeated Words in Radcliffe and Her Psychological Pictorialism; Charging Through After a Lull Romance of the Forest: Good Books and Essays on; Robert Miles's The Great Enchantress and Judith W. Fisher's "The Stage on the Page: Sarah Siddons and Ann Radcliffe."
• Mar 7: Vol III, Chs 15-16: Escape, Inset Novella (Clara's story, a Marmontel-like tale, Imprisonment; Beautiful Descriptoins; Centrality of the Feminine, Edinburgh & Subversive Castles.
• Mar 14: Vol III, Chs 17-18: The Forest by Francois Boucher; Dream Logic; Milton and Shakespeare; Artificial Literary Landscape Interlude.
• Mar 21: Vol III, Chs 19-20: Romancing the Sea & Prison; John Crome and the Norwich School of Painters; French Debtors' Prison in the ancien régime.
• Mar 28: Vol III, Chs 21-23: The Rationalization? Snow White and Dreams and Still Pictures; The Explanation: Long Complicated Unravelling.
• Apr 4: Vol III, Chs 24-26: The Happy Conclusion; The Heroine Pattern & Evasions; Leora Sherman's Ann Radcliffe and Gothic Romance: A Psychoanalytical Approach; Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces Applied to a Heroine; Those Blood-Soaken Dreams; Mocking the Visibilia; On making fun of it and the fawn; The Mesmerizing Style; Moral Lessons: ; Interesting Figures, Interesting Arguments; the good doctor.
• A student journal-essay: Passion and Romance in Ann Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

A list of good general books

• Coral Ann Howells's Love, Mystery and Misery
• Elizabeth Napier's The Failure of the Gothic
• Juliann Fleenor's The Female Gothic
• Diane Long Hoeveler's Gothic Feminism
• Judith Wilt's Ghosts of the Gothic.