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The History of Gothic Fiction by Markman Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 261 pp., $22.00.
The title of Markman Ellis's book works in two ways. On the one hand, the suggestion is that the book will offer a straightforward history of the development of Gothic fiction, proceeding along chronological lines, covering major authors and works, summarizing gothic conventions and machinery. Certainly the blurb on the back cover supports that notion: 'Written with an undergraduate audience in mind, this text offers a synthesis of the main topics of Gothic interest and clearly argued summaries of critical debate.' The book itself does read at times like a kind of'Gothic textbook': it contains a great deal of summary and covers a lot of familiar ground. But on the other hand, this blurb doesn't in any way accurately describe the book, which isn't synthetic or especially clearly argued, and which doesn't even attempt to summarize or engage extensively with critical debates. Instead, Ellis puts psychoanalytic and rhetorical approaches to Gothic entirely to the side in order to concentrate on historicist readings of the texts under discussion. As Ellis states: 'the chapters that follow do not offer a comprehensive history of the gothic novel, but rather, offer a series of readings of the use of history in the gothic novel. Describing how history is adopted and recycled in the Gothic novel, the book considers how 'the gothic' is itself a theory of history: a mode for the apprehension and consumption of history'(ll). The book aims to uncover the historical underpinnings of gothic texts, to relate formal and rhetorical features to historical events and situations.
In foregrounding 'history', Ellis signals his break from modes of analyses that have dominated criticism of the gothic up until this point, primarily psychoanalytic. Indeed, Ellis insists that 'the gambit of this book is to offer an account of gothic fiction without recourse to the language or theory of psychoanalysis' (13). Not using psychoanalytic terminology is one thing, but failing to engage with or even acknowledge psychoanalytic accounts of Gothic literature seriously weakens the publisher's claim that the book 'will be an ideal text for all those with an interest in the Gothic.' For since, as Ellis acknowledges, 'critical accounts of gothic fiction have been...