Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel Book

This is a somewhat odd book, in that it's less about the Gothic novel than it is about literary historiography, and gives itself license to cover a lot of ground. The first 50 pages are an overview of literary studies. I'm not kidding. There's a summary of formalism, marxism, and reader response theory, and the problems of each approach. The next chapter describes two new (well, they were new then) approaches to the gothic and why they don't work. Chapter 4 is in some sense the main argument - Richter describes this theory that all Gothic novels are in some sense descendents of Pamela, except splitting Mr B into two characters (good guy and villain), and these adaptations make it kind of incoherent. I don't entirely agree with him, but it's an interesting argument. The next chapter kind of rehashes arguments made by E J Clery and Ina Ferris, about how the Gothic signals (or creates) a new form of reading. Chapter 6 brazenly tours Gothıc legacies in Victorian and even 20th century fiction. The final chapter returns to the literary historiography question, picking on new historicism a bit, and is decidedly less impressive somehow than the rest of the book.

Overall, it's definitely an interesting read (if you're working on the gothic novel) and worthwhile, but feels much more like a survey of the field than a contribution to it.