The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing, 1764-1820

Citation

Townshend D (2007) The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing, 1764-1820. AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 54. New York: AMS Press. http://www.amspressinc.com/titles/64854.html

Abstract
The Orders of Gothic discusses a selection of Gothic romances, dramas, and chapbooks written and published in Britain between Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer of 1820. It is only in its chronological boundaries that this study is conventional; Townshend’s unusual theoretical approach utilizes Foucauldian new historicism and Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand the construction of subjectivity and modernity in British Gothic literature. Townshend employs theories from Foucault’s The Order of Things and History of Sexuality as a primary—and typical—conceptual framework through which the apparent “modernity” of the Gothic is systematically explored. But he also addresses the ways in which Foucault’s theories fall short of a full explanation of the often horrific excesses of Gothic writing. With these oversights in mind, Townshend turns to the psychoanalytic perspectives of later theorists including Freud, Žižek, and Lacan as more satisfactory articulations of those Gothic matters upon which Foucault is silent. But as Lacan is shown to supplement Foucault, so Foucauldian theory anchors an otherwise ahistorical psychoanalytic tradition, in an unending process of exchange.