Bloody Records: Manuscripts and Politics in The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) famously begins when a giant medieval helmet plummets from the sky and fatally crushes Conrad, the only son and heir of Manfred the Prince of Otranto, on his wedding day. This event is a harbinger of things to come as more supernatural objects from the past descend in various ways on the castle to reveal the true history of Manfred’s ill-gotten rule over Otranto. As Manfred plots to divorce his wife and marry Conrad’s fiancée, Isabella, he stalks Isabella through a castle increasingly characterized by its medieval malevolence: a giant, armored hand appears on a banister; an army arrives bearing a colossal, ancient sword; a figure walks out of an old, musty portrait; a skeletal monk speaks. The novel reaches its climax when, in a case of mistaken identity, Manfred accidentally stabs his own daughter in a fit of rage. In the tumultuous denouement, the spirit of Alfonso the Good, the original Prince of Otranto and ghostly owner of the giant spectral objects that have mysteriously appeared throughout the story, materializes. He breaks the castle into ruins, reveals a seedy history of murder and forgery, and names a local peasant, Theodore, the rightful heir to Otranto before ascending into the sky in a giant fireball alongside St. Nicholas. Otranto’s wild supernatural machinations would become stock features of the Gothic novel, as would its medieval setting. In fact, critics have frequently treated the novel’s historicity as its most important formal feature. By setting Otranto in the murky medieval past, Walpole would seem to remove characters and readers alike from the empiricist ideologies of the Enlightenment and the demands of realist fiction, facilitating the Gothic’s unbelievable plot devices and sentimental effects. Understanding the
Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole's Gothic Historiography
The “antiquarian” attitude is not an imperfect approximation to something else—which would be the maturity of scientific, professionalised historiography. It is a specific, lived relationship to the past, and deserves to be treated on its own terms.1
The power of negativity : selected writings on the dialectic in Hegel and Marx
Part 1 The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism Part 2 Studies in Hegalian and Marxian Dialectics, 1956-63 Part 3 Theory and Practice at a Turning Point, 1964-71 Part 4 After Philosophy and Revolution: Hegel's Absolutes and Marx's Humanism, 1972-81 Part 5 The Changed World and the Need for Philosophic New Beginnings, 1982-87