Social Reform in Gothic Writing

Ellen Malenas Ledoux is Assistant Professor and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Rutgers University, Camden, USA. She specializes in Romanticism, the Gothic, and transatlantic writers of the Revolutionary period. She has published articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Women's Writing.

• 1. Introduction: Fantastic Forms of Change 2. Emergent Forms: Horace Walpole, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century Reader 3. A Castle of One's Own: The Architecture of Emerging Feminism 4. Transmuting the Baser Metals: The Post-Revolutionary Audience, Political Economy, and Gothic Forms in Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century 5. 'Schemes of Reformation': Institutionalized Healthcare in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn 6. Re-forming Genres: Negotiating Slavery in the Works of Matthew Lewis Bibliography Index

“Ledoux’s examination of gothic writing in relation to social reform … demonstrate its claims with evidence from a wide array of historical documents, and it succeeds in mounting a convincing argument about the ‘political activism’ of the early gothic … . the study is well written and rigorous, and it joins a recent groundswell of scholarship on the political and cultural work of gothic and horror fiction from the eighteenth century to the present.” (Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016)