CONTESTED CASTLE

The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.''The Contested Castle offers a new and important perspective on the Gothic tradition of English novels. Viewing Gothic novels by men as responses to the early nineteenth-century idealization of domesticity, Ellis argues that male novelists were struggling to develop a convincing definition of masculinity in the light of the culture's proliferating definitions of femininity.''--Mary Poovey, author of Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England ''Ellis sheds special light on the way capitalist relations and the culture of capitalism influenced the way women lived, envisioned, wrote, and read their own narratives. It's a story at least as gripping and at least as terrifying as the male and female Gothics that Ellis so gracefully presents and interprets.''--Lillian S. Robinson, author of Sex, Class, and Culture