Q: As you describe in your Very Short Introduction, the Gothic is obsessed with the Catholic past—as we can see in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian. How did English politics square its obsession with the Catholic past and its creation of a new Whig identity in the Gothic?
A: Ann Radcliffe puts her finger on that in her essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, published posthumously in 1826. In this essay, she suggests that all the ghosts in the recent English literary tradition have their origin in the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
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