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Antiquarian Gothic Romance

Consolidating the themes explored in previous chapters, Chapter 6 turns to consider the ‘antiquarian Gothic romance’, an oxymoronic strain of Gothic writing that, even as it peddled its hyperbolic, highly fanciful tales, self-consciously aspired towards the rigour and facticity of the antiquarian topographical method. Having discussed these impulses in a selection of lesser-known Gothic romancers, as well as the curious antiquarian romances of writers such as Thomas Pownall and Joseph Strutt, the chapter focuses on two literary responses to the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire: Ann Radcliffe’s posthumously published Gaston De Blondeville (1826), and Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). As in previous chapters, Gothic ruins are shown to call up vastly competing imaginative constructions of the Gothic past, each of which is politically inflected: the Tory ‘white Gothic’ of Scott, and the radicalism of Radcliffe.