Sinister histories : Gothic novels and representations of the past, from Horace Walpole to Mary Wollstonecraft / Jonathan Dent.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Cover; Half-title; Title page; Copyright information; Dedication; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction: history and the Gothic in the eighteenth century; Enlightenment: histories of England and the changing nature of eighteenth-century historiography; Literature, history and the rise of the Gothic novel; Enlightened pasts versus Gothic pasts; Gothic heterogeneity: historical displacement and the past as subterfuge; The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Gothic; Notes.

1 Contested pasts: David Hume, Horace Walpole and the emergence of Gothic fictionContaining the past: Hume and historical frameworks; The rise of the Gothic: Walpole's historiographical discontent; Otranto and the textual nature of the past; Writing the past, writing the present; An imaginative revolt; Writing the past, writing the uncivilised; The Gothic and chance; The Gothic, domestication and defamiliarisation; Notes; 2 '[B]ringing this deed of darkness to light': representations of the past in Clara Reeve's The Old ... ; The Loyalist Gothic and the American Revolution.

Rapin, Walpole and Reeve: the Gothic, providence and the pastSupernatural pasts: providence and Reeve's didactic Gothic; Conflicted pasts: Rapin and Whig history; Historical perils: Whig history, Reeve and the Gothic; Old Whig reform: class and female persecution; Historical nightmares: Rapin and the 'Gothic' constitution; The Old English Baron and fears of constitutional degeneration; 'Gothic times and manners': Reeve, Rapin and military history; The Old English Baron and the nature of the past; The Gothic authoress and history; Notes.

3 'Entombed alive': Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783-85), the Gothic and historyThe reign of Elizabeth I: history, the Gothic and Lee; The Recess, the Female Gothic and history; Historical entrapment: Gothic villains and persecuted heroines; The Recess, history and ghostly women; Buried writings: women, history and civil death; The curse of the mother: women and the perils of sensibility; 'Gothicising' the epistolary: Lee and representations of the past; The Recess, history and the legacy of the Female Gothic; Notes.

4 '[E]very nerve thrilled with horror': the French Revolution, the past and Ann Radcliffe's The Romance ... The pamphlet war, romance and historiography; Revolution: the Gothic, the past and the Great Enchantress; Seventeenth-century France, 1790s France; Political pasts: history, romance and the pamphlet war; The Romance of the Forest and the politics of the past; The Romance of the Forest, the Gothic and historical consciousness; Romantic impulses: the Gothic manuscript, the past and the sublime; Terror: history, Adeline and the sublime; Conclusions: the Enlightenment and providence; Notes.

Showing how the Gothic can be read as a complex reaction to Enlightenment methods of historical representation, Sinister histories uncovers hitherto neglected relationships between Gothic texts and prominent works of eighteenth-century history.

In English.

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