However, as Felski observes, “Much work in the New Historicist vein . . . leans toward diagnosis rather than dialogue.”Many of these studies imply that to read gothic novels without ascribing their features to specific historical forces is to read them badly. Felski explains that New Historicism was an important corrective to “grand narratives”— the oversimplification of history in service of a particular perspective—but she argues that it has over corrected by keeping texts bounded in their historical periods.She writes that “standard ways of thinking about historical context are unable to explain how works of art move across time.In this dissertation I am interested in the manner in which the work of novelists and critics reaches us across time—for example, in chapter 1, how present-day fans of Jane Austen learn about The Castle of Wolfenbach from her list of “horrid novels,” or in chapter 2, how mid-twentieth-century paperback covers of The Monk present Lewis’s novel to readers as a sexy, modern thriller, and how these mediations facilitate different responses to the texts. In my inclusion of these sorts of mediations, I am drawing on Bruno Latour’s theories to some extent. Latour emphasizes the importance of the human and nonhuman mediators that enable certain ways of knowing and interacting.In order to account for particular features in the current reception of the novels I write about in my dissertation, I will attempt to trace different lines of influence. These lines are not unbroken, as my reconstruction of them relies on the work that historicist scholars have done and the texts that digitizers have preserved. I would argue, though, that these selections themselves are significant,pe grow bag as they help to demonstrate the priorities that have shaped our critical inheritance.
In gauging the importance of different critical voices, I have paid special attention to which early responses appear again and again in bibliographies and introductions and which quotations from those critical sources have served as a reference point for recent scholars. Often, scholars differ in the ways they contextualize the same response, as I examine in chapter 4 when discussing the selection and interpretation of Thomas Gray’s letter to Walpole about The Castle of Otranto, in which he writes that it “makes some of us cry a little.”I note that critics use Gray’s words variously as evidence that Walpole fooled his contemporaries into reading sentimentally, that earlier readers found the novel effective in a way that is no longer possible, that Walpole’s inner circle understood that he meant the work to be satirical, or that Gray was simply being polite. I, in turn, read the frequent use of this quotation as evidence that critics have attempted for years to resolve the emotional indeterminacy of Otranto by using Gray’s letter as a window into Walpole’s intentions. A trans-historical approach is especially relevant when considering how minute details of older works affect readers today. Wai Chee Dimock, in “A Theory of Resonance,” calls for “diachronic” rather than synchronic historicism. She argues that “the text, as a diachronic object, yields its words differently across time, authorizing contrary readings across the ages and encouraging a kind of semantic democracy.”Attending to “the changes in the webs of meaning surrounding individual words,” she writes that “[t]hese semantic webs, broadening, contracting, acquiring new overtones and inflections, bear witness to the advent and retreat of social norms.”For instance, in chapter 3, I examine changing historical associations of the word sweet that could inflect different readings of Radcliffe’s portrayals of femininity in Udolpho. I also use this technique when thinking about changes in the grammar of emotional expression in chapter 1 and the punctuation of dialogue in chapter 4.
Even the smallest details of fictional texts can accrue affective associations that transform over time and alter readers’ engagements with novels. Historicizing these associations allows us to see the specific ways these texts are in flux and helps some of the historical variability of responses. That is to say, a professional critic immersed in the age of sensibility reads a gothic novel differently from a mid-twentieth-century magazine critic with a taste for minimalism, a twenty-first-century scholar comparing electronic reproductions different editions of a gothic novel in an office reads differently than a college student on break curled up with a Kindle, etc. Though I do not conduct experiments or surveys to determine how people read, I approach reception with an awareness of how different circumstances structure reading and how public literary judgments can implicitly or explicitly recommend ways of feeling about novels. A crucial goal of my approach to reception is to make legible the emotional conventions of recent scholars and amateur critics. As Lynch notes, the popular stereotype of scholars as emotionless is false, and this stereotype often opposes scholars to amateur readers “not yet subjected to the affective deformation that supposedly comes with formal education.”In Lynch’s view, we are all formed by historical constructions of literature as an object of love, but as I discussed above, the modern history of reading literature has also constructed nonprofessional readers as a threat to themselves or to the broader culture. Willis describes the historical construction of reading as involving “the division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of reading, and the way these map on to gender, class and race”—ideas that she argues “continue to structure both critical and popular notions of audience and reception down to the present day.”The discourses of good and bad, tasteful and tasteless do not explicitly invoke gender, class, and race today, as they did in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, but the way they deal with emotion can be a coded way of reinforcing the construction of certain groups of readers as bad. Many of the twentieth-century writers who helped establish scholarly approaches to criticism employ language or methods that place emotion within a hierarchy.
Lynne Pearce writes that the wording of W. K. Wimsatt and C. M. Beardsley’s mid-twentieth-century concerns that the “affective fallacy” “ends up in impressionism and relativism” allows us to “speculate that their real anxiety is with the fact that such indeterminacy signals a reader’s lack of control over both the text and the reading process; and such lack of control is, in modern Western culture, a mark of both the feminine and the uneducated, working class.”Though the formative work of reception theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and Roland Barthes allows more importance to the role of the reader than previous critics did, Pearce writes that their emphasis on interpretation of the text rather than engagement with it still draws on “the gendering of knowledge” and “the class politics which has made ‘the ability to interpret’ the sign of bourgeois status.”By focusing on the emotional dimensions of responses from different kinds of critics, including scholarly ones, I am contributing to efforts to explore and validate previously devalued modes of reading and responding to literature. Scholars have become more interested in the differences and similarities of lay and professional readers, as John Guillory terms them. Writing in 2000,growing bags he considers their forms of reading to be two entirely different practices. His description of professional reading is similar to Felski’s, as one that is “vigilant,” “stands back from,” and is “wary” of pleasure.For Guillory, though, this is preferable to lay reading, which he describes as solitary consumption for enjoyment or diversion alone.Felski, however, argues that “in spite of their differences,” academic methods of reading and common methods of reading “share certain affective and cognitive parameters.”In response to fears about the current status of reading outside academia and concerns about paranoid reading inside academia, Magnus Persson argues that “we should become more curious about our own and others’ impassioned reading.”To act on this curiosity, Persson recommends studying the way more people read with more entirety. He writes, “Exploring the diversity of reading practices entails several perspectives: investigating reading practices available outside the educational system; viewing individual reading practices as a multitude of complex entities of which text interpretation is only one; and paying closer attention to the social dimensions of reading.”These are three of the objectives I attempt to achieve in my dissertation by focusing on the responses of amateur critics, the emotional qualities of lay and professional responses, and the ways critics influence each other, including in online forums. The responses I use in my dissertation include periodical reviews contemporary to the novels I analyze, criticism from nineteenth-century essays or studies of literature, private correspondence, twentieth-century magazine articles, conference papers, dissertations, and literature blogs, but I devote the most attention to scholarly monographs and articles of the last four decades and online review criticism.
In chapters, I often separate the responses of scholars and amateur critics not only because I expect my scholarly audience will view these groups differently but also because of the notable distinctions between their respective review conventions, subject matter, or tone that allow for insights into their respective affective approaches to the texts. Within those groupings, when scholars or amateurs write different kinds of emotional responses, I further subdivide them, and when the responses of scholars and amateurs are similar in some ways, I set them alongside each other. The responses I have chosen are ones that represent trends I have noticed in reception, ones that have been especially influential, and ones that offer particularly rich phrasing for analysis. Though I have been very selective in the amateur responses I quote, I attempted to read as many online reviews as possible for each novel. Most of the online reviews I use come from Amazon, Goodreads, and LibraryThing. Megan Milota, who has contributed to establishing methodology for the quantitative study of reader response in online book reviews, has judged these three sites to be similar enough to use without differentiating among them because, in addition to their common use of a five-star rating system, they all allow “the chance to participate in the literary field, a sense of community, an opportunity to present oneself, and finally, the chance to gain or display status” .All three sites aggregate ratings and reviews for particular books across most editions but have separate ratings and reviews for a handful of editions, such as ones where a novel is included in a collection. There are differences among the platforms, though: Amazon is an online megastore, whereas Goodreads and LibraryThing are social networking sites that let users record the books they’ve read or want to read and connect with other readers. Amazon allows ratings only with reviews, Goodreads allows ratings without reviews, and Library Thing allows ratings with reviews but also tracks “mentions” and “conversations” in its forum postings. Goodreads is the most active site for amateur criticism, with its main listing for Udolpho featuring 11,300 ratings and 839 reviews as of March 7, 2018, whereas Amazon has 139 aggregated ratings and reviews and LibraryThing has only 45 ratings and reviews with 378 mentions and 2 conversations. Milota observes that amateur reviews tend to use review conventions, though more loosely than professional reviews, writing that “while there may have been a degree of flexibility in the format, register, and formality of reviews, they still followed an established template of what was deemed appropriate by the broader community of readers.”These standards are maintained through features that allow users to rate or comment on each other’s reviews. Milota is one of a growing number of scholars who use empirical methods to study reception, part of a broader turn toward the sciences in studying literature. Though I initially tried to analyze amateur reviews quantitatively, the correlations I found between numbers of stars and positive or negative assessments were minimal, and more often, amateur critics used mixed assessments and emotional language that demanded interpretation. Like the affectively inflected assessments of recent scholars and critics from older historical periods, these reviews present complex engagements with the text, the broader critical culture, and narratives of history that need to be more closely analyzed and considered in conjunction with the emotional features of the text and its historical and present-day positioning. In her article about the British reception of a novel about Caribbean immigrants, Anouk Lang analyzes the responses of nonprofessional readers to an online survey and in transcriptions of recorded book group discussions, selecting and interpreting these responses in a qualitative way that is more similar to my approach.