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Duggett, Tom. Gothic Romanticism; Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form. New York: Palgrave, 2010. 219 pp. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-230-61532-8. $80.00.
An academic study of Gothic literature that focuses exclusively on William Wordsworth and his fellow Lake Poets reveals as much about the ascendancy of Gothic studies as it does about Wordsworth's poetic project. Positioned in relation to Michael Gamer's Romanticism and the Gothic (2000), which uses public reception to trace the development of Romanticism through its opposition to the Gothic (despite borrowing Gothic material), Tom Duggett's Gothic Romanticism argues for greater continuity, with Wordsworth's Romanticism as a "purer" strand purposefully located within the Gothic, In the vibrant debate over the dialogue between Gothic and Romantic aesthetics, sparked by Bertrand Evans's work on Gothic drama and by Robert Hume and Robert Platzner in PMLA (1969), recent scholars such as Michael Gamer and Carol Margaret Davison consider Romanticism a high-culture movement that denies its indebtedness to low-culture Gothic and sentimental fiction. Arguing for the Lake Poets' avowed Gothicism, Duggett claims that "from the mid-1790s until at least the early 1830s, British culture was self-consciously 'Gothic,' and that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were instrumental in making it so" (8). The title of Duggett' s book reflects this broader claim.
Readers will be more satisfied with the limited scope of Duggett' s study (spanning 1789-1815) if they know up-front to expect neither the usual pantheon of Gothic novelists nor a critical framework for rethinking Gothic literature. With its four literary chapters dedicated to Wordsworth's lesser known, early texts - Salisbury Phin (1894), The Convention of Cintra (1809), The Excursion (1814), and The White Doe of Rylstone (1815) - Gothic Romanticism is closer to a single-author study designed to appeal to specialists in Romantic studies than an intercession in a broader conversation on Gothic literature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott receive attention, but readers should not expect more than a name-drop at best for contemporaries like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, or Maria Edge worth. The book's investment in the Gothic of Wordsworth's poetry over Gothic literature of the period is reflected in its bibliography, which omits prominent scholars of the Gothic relevant to Duggett' s study, such as Robert Miles, Diane Long Hoeveller, Chris Baldick, Anne Williams,...