‘This trade of Death’: war and the figure of the soldier in Gothic fiction, 1764-1823

This thesis explores the British Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular focus on those authors publishing in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during the years of the Revolutionary Wars. Although there has been significant critical study into the Gothic as a literature of terror, responding to the political climate after the fall of the Bastille, very little academic study has interrogated the Gothic’s origins as a literature of conflict. This thesis argues that the conventions begun by Horace Walpole in 1764 and continued by writers such as Ann Radcliffe into the 1790s were used within Gothic novels to engage with social anxieties relating to and surrounding war. These novels repeatedly use soldiers as both heroes and villains, employ war as a backdrop to the plot, or place their narrative in a time specifically defined by war. By analysing the work of Walpole, Radcliffe, Francis Lathom, Regina Maria Roche, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley alongside contemporary pamphlets, poems, songs, and treatises this thesis explores how the Gothic, in the wake of the Seven Years War and on into the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, engaged with concerns about conflict, the army as an ideological body, and with the soldier himself. Drawing on ideas of chivalry and a growing trend towards nationalism, this thesis explores the ways in which the Gothic was used to discuss notions such as masculinity and national identity whilst reacting to the ever-changing realities of a nation at war.