Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Method

Traces Ann Radcliffes experimentations with history and playfulness with genre.
This book sketches the methodological and experimental qualities of Ann Radcliffes works, considering the use of history, fragmentation, generic slippage and narrative construction across her oeuvre. It provides a new reading of Radcliffes works, encompassing novels, travel writing and verse, in the light of historical philosophies around presence and previously unstudied archival material. The book places her writings in fruitful dialogue with archival material that not only gives those works a sense of their late eighteenth-century context but also reveals the ways in which Radcliffe incorporated the concerns of her times, offering a broader reflection on what it means to write history. It draws parallels between the works of Radcliffe and significant late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Edmund Burke, Mary Wolls