Full Description
Adeline, the protagonist of Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, became a model for later Gothic heroines. Passionate, imaginative, and sensitive, in the course of the novel she travels rapidly through the forests and Gothic ruins of France, pursued by the villain de Montfort and perpetually threatened by what appear to be supernatural events. The publication of The Romance of the Forest in 1791 had a significant impact on Radcliffe's career and on the rise of what would be known as the Gothic novel. The novel was widely praised upon publication and became a measure of quality against which all her future novels were gauged. Along with critical praise, The Romance of the Forest found an enthusiastic general audience and opened the new genre of Gothic Romance to a wider range of readers. The extensive historical appendices provide material on the novel's contemporary reception, the Gothic novel, sensibility and sentiment, and the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ann Radcliffe: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the TextThe Romance of the Forest
Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews
1. From The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature (April 1792)
2. From Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (May 1792)
3. The Town and Country Magazine (June 1792)
4. The Scots Magazine (June 1792)
5. From English Review (November 1792)
Appendix B: The Romance, the Novel, and the Gothic
1. From William Congreve, 'The Preface to the Reader,'Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconciled: A Novel (1692)
2. From Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 4 (31 March 1750)
3. From Horace Walpole, Preface, The Castle of Otranto, 2nd ed. (1765)
4. From Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785)
5. Anonymous, 'Terrorist Novel Writing,'The Spirit of the Public Journals (1797)
Appendix C: The Aesthetics of the Sublime and the Picturesque
1. From Longinus, Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime (first century CE)
2. From John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704)
3. From Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
4. From Anna Laetitia Aikin (later Barbauld) and John Aikin, 'On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,'Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773)
5. From William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792)
6. From Ann Radcliffe, 'On the Supernatural in Poetry,'The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (1826)
Appendix D: Sensibility and the Sentimental
1. From Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
2. From Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768)
3. Helen Maria Williams, 'To Sensibility'(1786)
4. From Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction (1788)
5. From Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Works Cited and Recommended Reading
