The Progress of Romance
Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel
David H. Richter
In this vigorous response to recent trends in theory and criticism,
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 modern literary ideas underlying our historical explanations—Marxism,
formalism, and reception theory— are unable, by themselves to inscribe an
adequate narrative of origins, development, and decline of genres and style
systems. Despite theorists' attempts to incorporate other 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 essential reading for scholars of British literature, narrative, narrative
theory, the novel, and the theory of the novel.
David H. Richter is
professor of English at Queens College and at the Graduate School and University
Center, City University of New York. He is also director of graduate studies at
Queens College, where he has taught eighteenth-century studies and literary
theory since 1970. Richter is the author of Fable's End and the editor of
several books, including Falling into Theory, Narrative/Theory, and
The Critical Tradition.
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THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
