Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1976. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick divides her novel (which was originally a doctoral thesis) into four chapters. The first, "The Structure of Gothic Conventions," "suggest[s] a specialized map of The Gothic Convention" (6). Sedgwick examines themes that pervade Gothic literature, such as "the sudden, mysterious, seemingly arbitrary, but massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be most accessible" (13) a level above their representations. Recognizing that "no other modern literary form as influential as the Gothic novel as also been as pervasively conventional" (6) Sedgwick tries to assimilate these conventions into a structure which defines the traditional Gothic. She examines motifs such as the "unspeakable," narrative difficulties in the linear progression of the story and conflation of the internal as archetypically Gothic.

The second and third chapters, "Language as Live Burial: Thomas De Quincey" and "Immediacy, Doubleness and the Unspeakable: Wuthering Heights and Villette" examine, respectively, the use of language in De Quincey's Gothic and the usage of the several specific Gothic conventions in two later novels. Sedgwick concentrates in both chapters on the act of story telling, in De Quincy relating the interruption of narrative to a Kant quotation ("previous conditions under which any experience at all is possible:..." (41)) while in the latter chapter describing the way in which Bronte adjusts narration in Villette to symbolize a departure from identity with her main character. Sedgwick's final chapter has been individually annotated as a journal article, "The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel."

Entered by Justin on 26 July 2004 at 2:44 PM.