The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel

The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic NoveL By David H. Richter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. xii + 242 pp. $39-95

The English gothic novel seems to enjoy exceptional clarity of definition among the genres of prose fiction, thanks to a conspicuous set of topics (castles, monks, persecuted maidens) and relatively distinct chronological boundaries (1764-1824 or so). Its high generic resolution makes it a suitable object for the experiment in literary historiography that David Richter undertakes in his ambitious and interesting book. Richter complains, with some justice, that many of the historicisms professed in recent literary and cultural studies come down to an evasion or evacuation of history, by which he means a positivist model of history as a chronological chain of distinct events linked by cause and effect. Instead, Richter proposes an avowedly liberal and pluralist way of doing literary history, in which different methodologies dialogically complement one another to provide a "full and rounded explanation of a literary phenomenon" (viii). Such pluralism allows the historian to comprehend the "semi-autonomous" character of literary forms and so to account both for "intrinsic" forces of change within the institutional system of literature and for "extrinsic" pressures of mode of production, social formation, ideology, and so on.

Richter then draws on three methodologies, Marxism, formalism, and reception theory, for the demonstration at the core of The Progress of Romance. The Marxism he specifies is that of Macherey and Althusser, which reads cultural texts as foregrounding while attempting to resolve the contradictions of a dominant ideology. When it comes to defining that ideology and its historical ground, however, Richter prefers a looser concept, "attitude," derived (and softened) from Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" (56). Richter chides recent historicist explanations of the gothic, as a response to the French Revolution or to a gendered...