The eighteenth-century British gothic novels that readers take up today often have tumultuous reception histories, and ones I analyze in my dissertation, dating from 1764 to 1796, especially beg questions about how and why readers judge and feel differently about literature. My dissertation considers how these early gothic novels portray and invite feeling and how these portrayals and invitations produce startlingly different critical responses. For instance, early reviewers of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolphowrite that “the emotions of love, pity, grief, and anguish, are described with inimitable delicacy” and that its mysteries “do indeed harrow up the soul,” but a recent Goodreads review describes the novel as “a ‘slapping the heroine’ kind of funny.” I will propose explanations for divergent responses like these by closely analyzing how the novels construct emotional experiences using tools that gain or lose emotional relevance depending on a reader’s historical positioning and attitude toward the text. In doing so, I will pay special attention to the variable affective associations of formal, linguistic, and mechanical features—in the case of Udolpho, the way that Radcliffe’s use of the word sweet conveys a feminized emotional permeability that was pleasing in her time but can seem sickly in ours. Gothic novels have proven to be particularly appropriate for this study of so-called bad writing.

Though early critics judged Udolphoto be exemplary, they excoriated and mocked most novels of its kind,plastic pot and even today many scholars treat the vast majority of gothic novels as mere historical ephemera—cheaply printed books that once provided undiscerning readers with excessive and derivative stories of no literary value. All of the novels in this dissertation have been labeled bad at some point by some group of readers, but the justifications for this label invite questions that I attempt to answer through detailed analysis of the texts and their criticism. I argue that because the craft of gothic fiction carries complex histories of emotional relation within and beyond the text, when critics judge the writing of these novels as good or bad, their judgments reveal less about the quality of the writing and more about the affective norms of literary and critical expression that inform the judgment. In turn, when critics argue that certain kinds of reading are good or bad, they draw attention to the ways these affective norms are in flux. Despite differences in norms, there are some notable similarities between the transitional moment of criticism in the latter half of the eighteenth century and our own moment of scholarly transition. In the era in which the novels I analyze were written, critics established their importance as guardians of the public’s taste, emotions, and morals amid the perceived cultural threat of the growth of the print medium, which democratized reading and increased the publication and circulation of novels. Today, professional literary critics are similarly called upon to redefine their role as they resist or adapt to unprecedented access to information, rapid cultural change, and the devaluation of the discipline, including the incursion of amateur book review sites that allow lay readers to disseminate their own judgments of works.

These online reviews play a crucial role in my dissertation, as I use them alongside recent scholarly studies and older responses to demonstrate how the emotional rhetoric and conventions of diverse critiques, when put in conversation with the details of the texts, can enhance scholarly understanding of the novels and the changing practices and investments of literary criticism itself. I begin by analyzing Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach , a novel that Jane Austen enshrined as “horrid” and one that both portrays and acts as a school for emotional interaction—a school that teaches habits of emotional judgment similar to those of recent criticism, though espousing different values. In my second chapter, I consider how the sensational style of The Monk by Matthew Lewis’s evokes uncomfortably mixed responses due to critical strictures and explore options for working beyond the current scholarly methods for writing about scandalous fiction. Next, I advance a method for identifying changes in what I call “emotional taste” in responses to Radcliffe’s Udolpho. In the final chapter, I examine how Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otrantocreates tonal ambiguity through dialogue, analyzing responses to this ambiguity in light of the development of the Camp and seeking other ways to hold open its emotional contrasts and indeterminacies. Rather than ordering my chapters chronologically, I proceed from analyzing large-scale compositional features to examining minute ones, beginning with Parsons’s sentimental, formulaic conventions and abstracted style and Lewis’s contrasting sensational conventions and direct style; moving to Radcliffe’s use of a single repeated word; and ending with Walpole’s punctuation, the smallest unit of composition that can hold emotional associations.A key interlocutor for my dissertation is Elizabeth Napier, whose study The Failure of Gothic is a touchstone for the considerations of gothic emotion that followed.

Napier argues that the formal and emotional ways gothic novels “fail” reveal how the genre was pushing up against representational limitations that would be resolved by Romantic forms. Prefacing her argument with a review of the critical history of the genre from her vantage point of 1987, Napier notes that gothic fiction “was seldom complimented by its contemporary critics” and even until the 1960s, “evaluations of Gothic fiction tended to be damaging, often in the extreme.”After this turning point, she describes “a tradition of criticism of Gothic that is radically bifurcated—especially on questions of quality.”Napier writes, “It is my intention in this study to suggest that the imprecision and extremes to which the Gothic has been subjected to critically are in part a result of instability and cross purposes in the form itself.”I find myself prompted to reassess the same novels she analyzes in light of their criticism and, like her, to seek explanations for this criticism in the writing of the novels themselves. As I revisit her argument three decades later, I see that the proliferation of gothic scholarship in the 1990s and 2000s validated the genre with crucial explorations of its historical and literary contexts, portrayals of women and foreigners, and philosophical and political engagements, among many other considerations. Maggie Kilgour reflects on many of these scholarly treatments, as well as Napier’s, in arguing that gothic form, “a Frankenstein’s monster,” inspires a critical tendency toward “dismemberment” in a focus on conventions,grow bag deconstructive readings of its critiques of modernity, and an overall hermeneutical ambivalence.I see a similar ambivalence in the emotion of criticism of the gothic, which, while rooted in gothic form, also speaks to the associations of particular writing techniques that precede and postdate the early British gothic era. Enabled by the work of scholars in emotion and reception studies, especially, I will argue that the important task is to examine not how gothic writing fails, but how we as critics judge it to fail or succeed, and that it is actually Napier and many other scholars who are pushing up against the limits of conventions for scholarly treatments of fictional emotion. In this study, I use different affective terms depending on whether I am focusing more on literary conventions , critical judgments that include low-intensity feelings , or novelistic portrayals of physicality . Most often, though, I prefer the common term emotion, a word that foregrounds action. In contrast to a psychological conception of emotion as solely personal, rhetorician Laura Micciche writes that emotions are “performative” because they are “acted and embodied in the social world.”Emotion is not easily separated into its imaginative, affective, and embodied components, nor do these personal feelings exist apart from the larger situations that enable them, as Lauren Berlant’s work on public affect and Daniel Gross’s work on the rhetoric of emotion have shown. For instance, Gross writes, “The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity [like the coverage of Princess Diana’s death] that has nothing to do with the inherent value of each human life and everything to do with technologies of social recognition and blindness.”Theorist Sara Ahmed explains the complexity of the way emotions are experienced and made available, writing that “emotions are what move us, and how we are moved involves interpretations of sensations and feelings not only in the sense that we interpret what we feel, but also in the sense that what we feel might be dependent on past interpretations that are not necessarily made by us, but that come before us.”

In this way, emotions are “mediated rather than immediate.”Ahmed’s concept of “stickiness” is a useful way to think about how this works specifically: “The sign is a ‘sticky sign’ as an effect of a history of articulation, which allows the sign to accumulate value . To use a sticky sign is to evoke other words, which have become intrinsic to the sign through past forms of association.”This occurs not only with words, Ahmed adds, but with bodies to which disgust “sticks.” For instance, in the case of gothic fiction, many scholars have argued that the genre’s association with women and people of low socioeconomic status has played a role in its stigma, and I have discovered that a comparable stigma clings to features as minor as the exclamation points that gothic works utilize. In my dissertation, I attempt to elucidate the emotional associations of words, grammatical and mechanical features, and literary conventions in order to help explain critical responses. I also seek to understand the emotions that are made available to critics in particular situations and the way those emotions are performed socially, which further shape the emotional landscape in which we read and write. More and more scholars have turned their attention to the origins of current literary critical practices and the feelings that these practices involve.I will discuss eighteenth century attitudes toward emotions and literature more shortly, as a background to the reception of the gothic novel, but here I would like to note some literary historical studies that especially speak to the shared emotional investments of the reading cultures of the eighteenth century and the present day. Trevor Ross describes the early formation of the British literary canon as an act of anxious protection of a literary tradition and the proper appreciation of it. He writes that by the eighteenth century, the project of elevating aesthetic productions involved abstracting them from worldly issues of commerce and politics: “Aesthetic value became a matter of felt-experiences within the consumer’s deeply embedded moral sense, of meanings perceived by the reader’s intuitive judgment, and of the shocks and terrors of the sublime upon the viewer’s sensibility.”Denise Gigante offers a complementary history by demonstrating how the development of the metaphor of aesthetic taste allowed for the idea of exalted literary pleasure to remain locked in symbolic struggle with the more immoderate, physicalized appetite of consumption.Though these distinctions have broken down somewhat, recent arguments about critical detachment show that they remain relevant. Addressing the history of literary scholarship, Jonathan Kramnick summarizes the state of literary criticism in the eighteenth century as a conflict between public-minded journalists and gate keeping academics. He views the condition of our contemporary discipline as the inheritance of this debate, which produces a “vexed desire” in its divergent impulses toward both “an aesthetics of amiable judgment” and a skeptical “repugnance of anachronism and aestheticism.”Deidre Lynch, in Loving Literature, emphasizes the continuities in attitudes toward literature rather than the conflicts, arguing that Kramnick too readily engages in the stereotype of the academic as the “thief of enjoyment,” a term Lynch adopts from L. O. Aranye Fradenburg’s analysis of the sacrifice of pleasure as a form of pleasure itself.Though Lynch does not delve deeply into current critical modes, she identifies affects of academic labor beyond the satisfaction of forgoing enjoyment, for example the pleasure of historical research or the romantic melancholy employed in our current disciplinary crisis narratives. Her disciplinary history primarily illuminates how the redefinition of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means that in the study of English, love has become naturalized and therefore expected. Though Lynch makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the amorous affects of literary criticism, I remain convinced by Kramnick’s account, whose claim about the tensions embedded in our discipline is borne out in my examination of vexed scholarly responses to the novels I discuss.