The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Old English Baron, first published in 1777 under the title The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, and then, a year later, under its present title, were the first two gothic novels. One can't imagine...
moreThe Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Old English Baron, first published in 1777 under the title The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, and then, a year later, under its present title, were the first two gothic novels. One can't imagine the two writers creating the genre as a single-(or even double-) handed feat of genius, partly because, for a new form to catch on, there must be an audience ready to appreciate it. Rather than studying what in the personal psychology of our authors would have led to this invention, then, it makes more sense to examine the intellectual ferment which made it possible. During the time that critics usually call the "Augustan" or "Neoclassical" literary period, conventionally dated from 1660 to 1740, there had raged what has come to be called "the Battle of the Books," named after a treatise written by Jonathan Swift. The battle was between "ancients" and "moderns," and Augustan polemics centered on proving who were the better writers, those of classical antiquity or those of modern Europe. As the name "neoclassical" implies, major literary figures of the time weighed in for the ancients, The Dunciad by Alexander Pope turning all "the moderns" into Dunces. But among scientists -"natural philosophers" as they were called -there was a contrary movement: the major developments in scientific study depended on the advent of "empiricism," of observing the world for oneself rather than adhering to what ancient authorities such as Aristotle had said about it. And among philosophers it became more important to reason correctly than to cite ancient authorities. Partaking of a new scientific and rational spirit, the eighteenth century was the age of Enlightenment in 1 Germany, Britain, and France insofar as people began to think for themselves rather than to rely on the say-so of past luminaries (Kant 90; see also Gay, ed.) -therefore, implicitly, to imagine that they might know better than the authorities who wrote in the past. But in the arts, the old is revered. The battle between ancients and moderns resulted from applying to literature the new, Enlightenment notion of historical "progress" in which the present is an improvement over the past.