Abstract

The dissertation realigns the criticism on the gothic genre by historicizing this favored, but often distorted, haunt of contemporary theory. At the forefront of the analysis are the discourses of historicism, nationalism, and colonialism as found in the works of Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve. The overly specialized focus of gothic scholarship makes the genre seem a warehouse for the long-lost precursors of whichever sublimity that we now desire to embrace, not a genre that in and of itself contains everything from the utmost of conservatism to the utmost of radicalism . By investigating gothic "real estate" rather than the gothic novel, I draw attention to the one feature that nearly all gothic texts have in common: that decayed mass of imperial ruin which, whether a Roman artifact, Catholic monastery, or feudal castle, operates as a prototype for and an antithesis of enlightenment modernity. ;Although I concentrate on the two earliest practitioners of the eighteenth-century gothic---Walpole and Reeve---I also consider David Hume, who gives shape to the enlightenment philosophy through which, and against which, these authors come to shape the genre, and Edmund Burke, arguably its first and certainly one of its most important theorists. Ultimately, I trace how the fabulous, far-away gothic edifice registers ambivalence about the inheritance of property within the British empire. During the second half of the century, with enclosure, colonization, and industrialization each accelerating at once, the inheritance of land was no longer the cut-and-dry family matter that it had been, nor was the bequest of vast estates, with holdings all over the globe, solely an aristocratic affair. Throughout, I investigate how these material legacies impact a trio of distinct, yet overlapping, symbolic legacies: those from a pre-Roman, nationalistic "gothic" past to an ostensibly homogenized, imperial British present, those from fathers to sons through the often forgotten reproductive labor of women, and those from eighteenth-century aesthetic precedents to current literary criticism. I argue that "conjuring," or the drive to make the past cater to the demands of the present, is paramount for all three