![]() 5 And, where The Critical Review had found the ghost of Strongbow tired and stale, the Gentleman's Magazine praised White for his originality: ‘The ghost of an antient baron, who stands high in the chronicles of military renown, rehearsing his adventures, in a narration continued through several progressive nights, each of which forms a chapter, is an idea that has not been started by any other writer’. 4 The Gentleman's Magazine, in contrast, emphasised the novel's romantic quality, introducing Earl Strongbow as an ‘imitation of Gothic romance possess a degree of merit which ought not to pass unnoticed’. It is not an eventful story to please general readers but we think many will be instructed in some points of history by it, and particularly in the manners of their ancestors’. ![]() 3 Despite highlighting the ‘inconsistency’ of a language unsuitable to the time of Charles II and various other anachronistic misdemeanours, The Critical Review ultimately commended Earl Strongbow as an amusing publication able to teach its readers much about the past: ‘we have been entertained with the tale. The Critical Review briefly dismissed White's use of the ghost of Strongbow to narrate the tale as ‘trite and hackneyed’ before offering a ‘minute’ dissection of the novel's many historical anachronisms. Reviews of White's Earl Strongbow (1789) oscillated in their classifications of the tale as either historical or romantic in nature. Looking back to the novels of James White, considered in Chapter 1, we see the manner in which late eighteenth-century critics struggled with the formal classifications that are often accepted without question today. While modern-day readers frequently view gothic and historical fictions of this period as distinctly different types of writing, especially in the period following the publication of Waverley (1814), contemporary accounts of these fictions are much more equivocal in their categorisations of works that were unquestioningly understood as cross-formal and cross-generic. As it does so, it underscores the formal and generic fluidity of Romantic-era literature. 2 Commenting slyly on the question of Scott's originality while also denying lasting fame to the period's most financially and popularly successful novelist, Banim's Revelations of the dead-alive perceptively reveals the formal and generic slippages of historical and gothic fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ![]() 1 According to the readers encountered in his travels, Scott is actually the ‘last and most successful adaptor or modifier’ of a gothic literary mode introduced by Walpole and practised by Lewis and Radcliffe. In twenty-first-century London, Banim's narrator realises, Scott is little read when he is, he is understood, as James Kelly points out, ‘not as the progenitor of the historical novel but rather as the last in line of an earlier Gothic style’. In his Revelations of the dead-alive (1824), John Banim depicts his time-travelling narrator encountering future interpretations of the fiction of Walter Scott. Gothic genres: romances, novels, and the classifications of Irish Romantic fiction This chapter also considers the manner in which scholarly attention to the national tale as the literary form par excellence of Irish Romantic writing suggests clear-cut demarcations of gothic and national literary modes that simply did not exist in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather, as the works considered here demonstrate, romance was conceived of in a much broader fashion by eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century writers. ![]() This recourse to romance or fancy was not simply confined to the depiction of supernatural figures or events as is often understood today. In a period of continued debates about the novel and its commitment to didactic realism, these works’ descriptions as ‘romances’ indicates their authors’ desire to appeal to their readers’ imaginations. This chapter assesses the terminology applied to literature now considered gothic, looking particularly at the preference for the term ‘romance’ amongst writers of what was then more commonly called ‘terrorist’ or ‘terror’ fiction.
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