Abstract
In "Thematizing the Subject from Gothicism to Late Romanticism," Slobodan Sucur takes Habermas's suggestion that "modern art reveals its essence in Romanticism; and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of Romantic art" and offers an analysis of a spectrum of primary texts in relation to the statement. The texts analysed range from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Odoyevsky’s Russian Nights. The texts are analyzed in chronological fashion, in an attempt to see how the thematization of the subject shifts as the Early Gothic novel (Walpole, Radcliffe) develops into High Romanticism (Hoffmann, Maturin) and finally into Late Romanticism (Poe, Odoyevsky). There appears to be a gradual but perceptible shift from third- to first-person narration across this broad period. Consequently, the present study engages ideas of the sublime (Edmund Burke, Carl Grosse), the picturesque (Uvedale Price), and spatial constructs, and attempts to see the ways in which such ideas reconfigure the subject and are themselves reconfigured as the subject is further thematized during these significant years in which the Gothic novel is transformed into other Romantic and Late Romantic forms.
Recommended Citation
Sucur, Slobodan.
"Thematizing the Subject from Gothicism to Late Romanticism."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
2.3
(2000):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1082>
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