Jennifer Camden - Böcker

The first volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints excerpts from rare Gothic novels to chart the relationship between Gothic aesthetics and the shifting economic, technological and legal affordances of print in the long nineteenth century. Highlighting the anonymous and pseudonymous authors, commercial presses and circulating libraries—such as the Minerva Press—that shaped the early Gothic more than any one author, the first half of the volume makes possible a revaluation of the collective voice of early Gothic fiction. The second half considers the increasingly sophisticated mediation and dissemination of Gothic novels. Victorian Gothics, such as James Malcom Rymer’s penny blood The Apparition and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Windsor Castle, were published both serially and in volume form. The movement between serial publication and volume formats provides a new context for study of the Gothic novel’s reliance on inset tales and cliffhangers, which can be understood as an effect of their publication within magazines and newspapers. Finally, the transatlantic publication circuits of May Agnes Gordon’s Midnight Queen and Julien Gordon’s Vampires shed new light on the Gothic and the development of international copyright law.

The second volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints Gothic chapbooks. These shorter and cheaper pamphlets capitalized on the Gothic’s popularity and were marketed to working-class audiences. Chapbook publishers such as Ann Lemoine and Thomas Tegg took advantage of copyright law’s failure to address formats beyond the book in order to abridge, excerpt and adapt versions of popular novels and dramas, particularly works by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. By commissioning elaborate frontispieces for almost all Gothic chapbooks, publishers also pioneered a visual language for the Gothic. Although many chapbooks were published anonymously, prolific chapbook writers, such as Isaac Crookenden and Sarah Wilkinson, have been dismissed as hacks because of their reliance on Gothic formulas and practices of adaptation. The Gothic chapbooks included in this volume challenge the marginalization of chapbook writers and publishers and frame the interplay between original and adaptation as central to studies of not only the chapbook form but also the Gothic itself.

The third volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints short Gothic fiction published in miscellaneous magazines. In doing so, it places Gothic fiction in direct conversation with the editorials, the advice columns, the travel accounts and the social and political commentaries that these magazines featured. These magazines also highlight the Gothic’s own miscellaneous nature, its tendency to incorporate poems, songs, translations, travel narratives and antiquarian materials. Early in the century, Gothic fiction was published primarily in women’s magazines such as The Lady’s Magazine and La Belle Assemblée. This shifted in the mid-century magazine. Gothic fiction by Samuel Ferguson and George Augustus Sala engages with the scientific content of Blackwood’s and the social commentary of Household Words, while Irish Gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu and James Mangan appeared alongside the antiquarian and political features of the Dublin University Magazine. This volume finds parallels between the history of the magazine and the history of the Gothic and, in doing so, links the Gothic in new ways to biography, translation, fashion, history and politics.

The fourth volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints Gothic plays that foreground the complex relationship between print and performance and the role of theatre in the development of Gothic conventions. Gothic dramas helped consolidate the Gothic tradition, keeping Gothic fiction from the late eighteenth century alive in an alternate form and extending the Gothic canon in new directions through the spectacular stage effects demanded by the nineteenth-century theatre. Novels that in the late eighteenth century were shocking reappeared later in the nineteenth-century theatre as parodies, poking fun at what was once considered terrifying. Toy theatres gave domestic consumers a chance to rehearse and revise their favourite Gothic dramas in miniature, and acting editions kept Gothic plays alive decades after their initial release, helping to build the Gothic canon. The Gothic pantomimes, melodramas and spectacles included in this volume invite new questions about the relationship between theatre, adaptation, print culture and the development of the Gothic.

Taking up works by Samuel Richardson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, among others, Jennifer B. Camden examines the role of female characters who, while embodying the qualities associated with heroines, fail to achieve this status in the story. These "secondary heroines," often the friend or sister of the primary heroine, typically disappear from the action of the novel as the courtship plot progresses, only to return near the conclusion of the action with renewed demands on the reader's attention. Accounting for this persistent pattern, Camden suggests, reveals the cultural work performed by these unusual figures in the early history of the novel. Because she is often a far more vivid character than the heroine of the marriage plot, the secondary heroine inevitably engages the reader's interest in her plight. That the narrative apparently seeks to suppress her creates tension and points to the secondary heroine as a site of contested identity who represents an ideology of womanhood and nationhood at odds with the national ideals represented by the primary heroine, whom the reader is asked to embrace. In showing how the anxiety produced by these ideals is displaced onto the secondary heroine, Camden's study represents an important intervention into the ways in which early novels use character to further ideologies of race, class, sex, and gender.