THOUGHTS IN THINGS: ANN RADCLIFFE AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVELIST.
Item
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Title
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THOUGHTS IN THINGS: ANN RADCLIFFE AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVELIST.
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Identifier
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AAI8203342
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identifier
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8203342
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Creator
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WEISSMAN, ALAN.
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Contributor
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Robert A. Day
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Date
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1981
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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Ann Radcliffe participated in a movement of psychological-novel writing which, in its exploration of the inner life of the mind, in certain ways anticipated the modern psychological novel. But the representation of thought--and other "psychological" elements--in her novels has never before been adequately analyzed.;Mrs. Radcliffe's novels have at various times been viewed, reductively, as the most unrealistic of romances; as no more than exemplifications of associationist psychologies or of Edmund Burke's concept of the "sublime"; as merely verbal exercises in the "picturesque"; as little more than exercises in fashionable sentimentality; and as contrivances of Gothic machinery intended merely to send chills down the reader's spine. A chief contention of this study is that a close and impartial reading of Mrs. Radcliffe's best novels reveals that all these views are, at best, misleading simplifications of complex literary texts. That one can learn from or recognize in her books the subtler human responses, the finer shades of thought, has occasionally been suspected, but, until quite recently, not significantly investigated. And the few psychological studies of her novels that the recent wave of interest in Gothic fiction has left us are seriously hampered by residues of old critical prejudices.;Even though recent critics have discovered psychological meanings in Ann Radcliffe's work, they have not recognized the extent to which she was a deliberate literary psychologist; they have not placed her novels in the context of early psychological fiction (perhaps because it has scarcely been recognized that there was such a thing as the "psychological novel" in the eighteenth century); they have made altogether inadequate attempts to link her literary psychology with the theoretical psychologies of eighteenth-century philosophers and critics; and though her fiction has recently been scrutinized from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the critics have never adequately correlated her psychological insights with those of psychoanalysis or other modern psychologies. This study takes all of these approaches.;One who reads Mrs. Radcliffe's novels as they deserve will find not a series of contrivances to thrill the reader but, rather, highly subtle and complex literary texts which evoke far more than (as has often been supposed) simply fear: they evoke an intricate web of images, thoughts, and feelings with particular and varied contents. And, besides different types of fear in a diversity of contexts, Mrs. Radcliffe's psychology embraces a whole range of emotions (with their concomitant intellectual and perceptual processes): joy, sadness, love, hatred, and so on. Moreover, her literary psychology brings to light numerous processes that involve these emotions, processes that, independently and by other methods, have been discovered by scientific and philosophical psychologists (including Freud). Particularly in The Mysteries of Udolpho, one may find archetypal configurations that give us insight into the profounder aspects of our experience.;This investigation concludes that, if Mrs. Radcliffe cannot be ranked with the greatest psychological novelists, she nevertheless deserves a significant place among the pioneers of psychological fiction--among the legitimate precursors of such novelists as Dostoevsky, James, Kafka, and Proust.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
