The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology - Hardcover

Ellis, Kate

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9780252015946: The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252015940 ISBN 13: 9780252015946

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1989

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The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture - the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic - and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror - the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel - to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.

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"Ellis sheds special light on the way capitalist relations and the culture of capitalism influenced the way women lived, envisioned, wrote, and read their own narratives. It's a story at least as gripping and at least as terrifying as the male and female Gothics that Ellis so gracefully presents and interprets." -- Lillian S. Robinson, author of Sex, Class, and Culture

"The strength of Ellis's The Contested Castle is in its linking of the Gothic novel with a bourgeois ideology that specified the role and place of women in its system. . . . In the light of her work, not only the Gothic novel but the rise of the novel and the realist novel will be reread as well." -- Mary O'Connor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction