The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.
| ISBN: | 9780252060489 |
| Publication date: | 1st June 1989 |
| Author: | Kate Ellis |
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 248 pages |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers |