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The Progress of Romance. Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel, by David H. Richter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. xi + 242 pp. ISBN 0-81420694-8. Hardcover, $39.95.
The Gothic novel has drawn a large splash of critical ink from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present-disproportionate it might seem for a genre that even at its best was not great in itself so much as a source of greatness in others. In a review essay published more than a decade ago titled "The Gothic Impulse" (Dickens Studies Annual 11 [1983]), the author of the book under review assessed no less than ten recent studies. At the time he observed that the trend in interest in the tale of terror away from "a discrete movement" to emphasis on it as "a perpetual influence," raises questions not only about the form itself, but about "the ways we write literary history." One had a feeling that there was still another book on the way, and here it is. Richter's title, taken from the historical excursus by Clara Reeve, one of the progenitors of the Gothic romance (The Old English Baron) is meant in a double sense-passage through time and development. He distinguishes between the Gothic as a genre, which came to an end roughly about 1820, and as a mode, which is still very much with us.
"This is a book about writing the history of the Gothic novel," Richter states at the outset (p. 2), placing it immediately at a triple remove from the basic interests of readers of this journal-books and publishers. Now and then we are carried back...