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S cholarship on Gothic novels tends to highlight their generally transgressive themes: secret plots, murder, illicit sex, kidnapping, and so forth. Where critical disagreement occurs, it usually happens over how we ought to understand the cultural subtexts underlying such subversive subjects. Typical questions deal with whether or not the Gothic mode is inherently conservative, a textual warning against excess, or if it provides a pointed attack against accepted social and cultural conventions. Though such questions have generated a large spectrum of theoretical approaches and tentative answers, there remains one area in which scholars seem to differ only rarely—that the Gothic novel is largely critical of, and biased against, Catholicism. For at least one hundred years, numerous critical articles and books have confirmed this point so often that everybody readily accepts the idea that novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or The Monk (1796) are thoroughly anti-Catholic and anticlerical. In The Gothic and Catholicism , Maria Purves takes a somewhat more nuanced position. She presents a largely convincing account of how scholars overlook the ways Gothic novels sometimes actually resuscitate the long-tattered image of Catholicism in their pages. For Purves, the Gothic novel should not therefore be reduced
Religion and the Arts – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2011
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