Radcliffe's Aesthetics: Or, The Problem With Burke And Lewis

How and why does Ann Radcliffe develop a Gothic aesthetic and then revise it? This article argues that the self-conscious Gothic constructions of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) are concealed in The Italian (1797). After Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) had parodied Radcliffe's Gothic techniques, she revises her earlier engagement with Edmund Burke in order to move beyond his claim that Terror can be rhetorically produced. Such issues have ramifications for an understanding of gender as these aesthetic concerns become staged in a debate, between Radcliffe and Lewis, centred on the representation of holy mothers. This article thus explores how a Gothic aesthetic was negotiated at the end of the eighteenth century.