Gothic Epistemology

Criticism on the Gothic novel has been plentiful, yet such work tends to view the Gothic novel within the constraints of genre rather than investigating its wider influence in the nineteenth century. “Gothic Archives” will track this influence, arguing that the Gothic novel indicates changing attitudes toward reading, and especially toward reading history, in the nineteenth century. Gothic novels such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and the meta-Gothic of The Antiquary (1816) presume that authentic historical experience is difficult, if not impossible, to represent accurately, emphasizing in their plots the misunderstandings that result from attempts to read and write historical experience. It follows that the Gothic novel typically stages scenes of reading that delve into (often fictional) archival sources. Thus Gothic novels always situate authentic historical knowledge within the archive, requiring characters to excavate obscure source material such as letters, books, portraits, wills, and the like in order to discover what the Gothic construes as historical truth. In so doing, the Gothic novel proffers a historically oriented epistemology of reading, founded upon the affective possibilities of history writing, which challenges the considerations of truth and accuracy that inform traditional historiography.

By investigating the emotional resonances of historical narratives, the Gothic novel questions how we as readers might arrive at a particular version of history. If the Gothic novel locates authentic historical representation in the archive, however, the act of interpreting the archive is almost never fully realized; interpretation in the Gothic novel is always a partial, interrupted, obscure process. This tendency indicate...

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...ht begin to situate the work that we as critics do in relation to the imaginative histories that inform our critical readings.

“Gothic Archives” engages some important bodies of critical writing which take as their subject the theoretical possibilities of the Gothic novel. It is indebted to Robert Miles’s work, which goes beyond simply enumerating Gothic conventions and instead formulates a theory of Gothic epistemology. It is also obliged to Eve Sedgwick’s work, which links Gothic epistemologies—what she calls paranoid reading positions—to the practice of literary criticism. “Gothic Archives” augments this work with a theory of the way that archives function in the Gothic novel, supplementing the above theories of Gothic epistemology with an account of the archive’s role in the Gothic as both a literal and a symbolic repository of cultural feelings and affects.