About This Volume
Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era
This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Robert Miles and essays by Fred Botting, Diane Long Hoeveler, Sophie Thomas, Dale Townshend, and Angela Wright.
This collection of essays explores the relationship between Romantic Gothicism and the rise of the visual technologies centred on commercial exploitation of the magic lantern. Although grounded in the technological innovations of the Romantic and early Victorian periods – and reactions to them – the essays in the collection anticipate modern attitudes towards visuality, developing the link between the rise of literary Gothic and subsequent visual technologies.
The text is encoded in HTML, but features no frames and a limited use of tables. It will work best with Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher or a comparable browser; earlier browsers may not display everything properly. Because you may enter and exit these files along multiple paths, you may need to use the back-arrow button on your browser to return to your starting point. The full text of the volume, like all hypertexts in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, is fully searchable.
The essays and other files were marked up in HTML by Kate Singer at the University of Maryland. The volume cover and contents page were also designed and marked up by Kate Singer. Lisa Rhody assisted in the production of this volume.
About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series
The Romantic Circles Praxis Series is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, RCPS recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. RCPS is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.
About the Contributors
Fred Botting is a Professor and Director of the Institute for Cultural Research at the University of Lancaster. He has written extensively on Gothic writing and media, on contemporary writing and culture and cultural theory. His books include Gothic (Routledge, 1996), Sex, Machines and Navels (Manchester UP, 1999) and—with Scott Wilson—The Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001) and Bataille (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)
[go to essay]
Diane Long Hoeveler is author of Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (1990) and Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (1998) and some 35 articles on a variety of literary topics. In addition, she has coauthored a critical study of Charlotte Bronte (with Lisa Jadwin), and coedited the MLA volumes on Approaches to Teaching Jane Eyre (with Beth Lau) and Approaches to teaching the gothic (with Tamar Heller). With Larry Peer, she coedited Comparative Romanticisms and another forthcoming volume, Romanticism and Its Other Discourses. She has also coedited a volume of essays, Women of Color, and another edited collection of essays, Written on the Bodily Text: Women Writers Across Cultures. With Jeffrey Cass she coedited Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogic Practices and with Janet Boles, she coauthored the Historical Dictionary of Feminism. More recently, she has edited the Houghton Mifflin volume of WutheringHeights. She is currently writing a book on gothic operas.
Robert Miles is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Victoria. His books include Ann Radcliffe: the Great Enchantress (Manchester 1995); Gothic Writing 1750: A Genealogy, 2nd ed. ( Manchester, 2002); and Jane Austen: Writers and their Work (Northcote, 2003). His most recent book, Romantic Misfits, is forthcoming from Palgrave.
Sophie Thomas is Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. Her research
projects include work on ruins and fragments, and on Romantic visual culture.
She has published various articles on these subjects, and is currently
completing a book on fragments, history, and the visual in the Romantic period.
Dale Townshend is a lecturer in English at the University of Stirling . He has published articles and chapters on Romanticism, the Gothic, and critical theory, and has co-edited with Fred Botting four volumes in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Routledge, 2004).
Angela Wright is a lecturer in Romantic literature at the University of Sheffield. She is currently completing two books, The Import of Terror: Britain, France and the Gothic Novel: 1780-1820 and The Reader's Critical Guide to Gothic Fiction. She has written a number of articles on Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and the Marquis de Sade, and Madame de Stael's Corinne. She is also the current secretary and treasurer of the International Gothic Association.
