Literary Form and Coastal Sublimity in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest

Roslyn Irving

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ABSTRACT (en)

This article explores Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and the eighteenth-century EcoGothic through her construction of the littoral space. Radcliffe’s early and middle romances combine prose with “interspersed” poetry and play with fictive European topographies. While Radcliffe’s landscape description has received significant attention in scholarly research, much less has been done to consider how her writing might contribute to understanding ecocritical concerns and values in eighteenthcentury literature. This article focuses on the coastal Gothic in The Romance of the Forest, which invites new understandings of the relationship between humans and the natural world and responds to calls from the Blue Humanities to reread the aquatic space.

KEYWORDS (en)

EcoGothic, Ann Radcliffe, Green Romanticism, form, littoral Gothic, sublimity

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.66.2

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