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

Ellis, Kate Ferguson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252060482 ISBN 13: 9780252060489

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1989

Synopsis

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.
 

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"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

About the Author

 
Kate Ferguson Ellis, associate professor of English at Rutgers, is co-editor of Caught Looking: Feminism, Censorship, and Pornography.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0252060482
• ISBN 13: 9780252060489
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 248