The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge's 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging "romantic" mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that "cheekiness," I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.18 month embargo; published online: 21 Jan 2019This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

From the Gothic Castle to the Romantic Haunted House: Disbelief, Conversion, Aporia, Abjection

We all acknowledge that the haunted house that saw an effulgence in Victorian English literature looks back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first text to call itself A Gothic Story in its second edition (1765), and transplants its castle replete with fragmentary ghosts, recalling that these are haunted by Walpole’s prefaces to both editions that urge readers not to believe in the medieval supernatural that underwrites his tale’s apparitions. Yet the decades that intervene between eighteenth-century Gothic and later Victorian hauntings (what we still call the Romantic era) produce only occasional haunted houses, and what appears in this vein exhibits a struggle, rooted in Otranto, over which elements of the Walpolean Gothic to convert, reject, half-employ, or half-satirize. By analyzing examples from Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and Byron’s Don Juan, this article shows that such insecurity in the Romantic haunted-house motif epitomizes the fundamental relationship of the Gothic to the Romantic. Here Gothicized houses become microcosms for abjecting the unresolved tugs-of-war among conflicting but pervasive ideologies over and against which Romantic writing strives to build its imaginative, and even its ironical, resolutions.18 month embargo; first published 29 March 2023This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]