Catholicism, sexual deviance, and Victorian Gothic culture / Patrick R. O'Malley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Malley, Patrick R., author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 51.

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 51

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Catholic Church--In literature.

Catholic Church.

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English--History and criticism.

Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English.

Paraphilias in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 279 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, & Victorian Gothic Culture

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

It has long been recognised that the Gothic genre sensationalised beliefs and practices associated with Catholicism. Often, the rhetorical tropes and narrative structures of the Gothic, with its lurid and supernatural plots, were used to argue that both Catholicism and sexual difference were fundamentally alien and threatening to British Protestant culture. Ultimately, however, the Gothic also provided an imaginative space in which unconventional writers from John Henry Newman to Oscar Wilde could articulate an alternative vision of British culture. Patrick O'Malley charts these developments from the origins of the Gothic novel in the mid-eighteenth century, through the mid-nineteenth-century sensation novel, toward the end of the Victorian Gothic in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. O'Malley foregrounds the continuing importance of Victorian Gothic as a genre through which British authors defined their culture and what was outside it.

Contents:

Introduction : skeletons in the cloister

Goths and Romans : the literature of Gothic from Radcliffe to Rushkin

"The church's closet" : Victorian Catholicism and the crisis of interpretation

Domestic Gothic : unveiling Lady Audley's secret

The blood of the saints : vampirism from Polidori to Stoker

"Monstrous and terrible delight" : the aesthetic Gothic of Pater and Wilde

Conclusions : Oxford's ghosts and the end of the Gothic.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 260-274) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-16919-4

0-511-31883-9

1-280-70368-7

0-511-24634-X

0-511-24701-X

0-511-24486-X

0-511-48489-5

0-511-24563-7

OCLC:

476020479