The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800
Editorial Reviews
Review
'Clery's breadth recalls Raymond Williams who could also have written a powerful statement like this ... The Rise of Supernatural Fiction should be read by an audience far wider than one concerned with Gothic culture alone.' The Wordsworth Circle
'... superbly articulate and engaging ... this latest addition to the excellent Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series is a refreshingly new 'empirical' approach to fantastic literature that relates its contents to issues of social, political and economic change'. The Byron Journal
'... a thoroughly and widely researched book ... intermittently witty as well as given to acute and insightful analysis'. Romanticism on the Net
Book Description
A genre of supernatural fiction was among the more improbable products of the Age of Enlightenment. This book questions the historical reasons for its growing popularity in the late eighteenth century. Beginning with the notorious case of the Cock Lane ghost, a performing poltergeist who became a major attraction in London in 1762, and with Garrick's spellbinding and paradigmatic performance as the ghost-seeing Hamlet, it moves on to look at the Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, and others, in unexpected new lights, drawing out the connection between fictions of the supernatural and the growth of consumerism.
The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800,E. J. Clery,Marilyn Butler,James Chandler,Cambridge University Press,0521664586,English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Literary Criticism,Literature - Classics / Criticism,British Isles,English,English fiction - 18th century - History and criticism,Literary Criticism & Collections / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Novels, other prose & writers: 16th to 18th centuries
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