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

By Kate Ferguson Ellis

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252060482
• ISBN13: 9780252060489
• Release Date: June 1989
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"