From ‘Castles in the Air’ to the ‘Topographical Gothic’: Architecture, History, Romance, 1760–1840

This lecture seeks to explore that process in which Gothic narratives of the late eighteenth century, though once played out against the backdrop of imaginary ruined castles and abbeys in Continental Europe, eventually came to be set in the ‘real’ Gothic ruins of Great Britain. Beginning with an account of Ann Radcliffe’s architectural imagination, but then proceeding to map the concerted ‘relocation’ of the Radcliffean mode in the fictions of a number of lesser-known Gothic romancers, the lecture charts the aesthetic, political and ideological consequences attendant upon the shift from fictional ‘castles in the air’ to what it terms the ‘topographical Gothic’ between the years 1760 and 1840.

The respondent to this lecture will be Professor Fred Botting (Kingston)

Fred Botting is Professor of English Literature at Kingston University, London. Prior to that he held Chairs at the universities Keele and Lancaster. He has published widely on Gothic Fiction and Literary Theory, including Making Monstrous, Gothic, and Limits of Horror.

Dale Townshend is Professor of Gothic Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. His publications include Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (with Fred Botting, 2004); The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing (2007); Gothic Shakespeares (with John Drakakis, 2008); The Gothic World (with Glennis Byron, 2014); Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (with Angela Wright, 2014); Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (2014); and Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Angela Wright, 2016). The recipient of an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (June 2015–December 2016), he is currently completing, among other projects, a monograph entitled Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840.

This event is part of the Gothic Manchester Festival at Manchester Metropolitan University. For more details and for the full event schedule please go to: https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/english/gothic-studies/gothic-manchester-festival/