Class and gender identity in 'male gothic' from Walpole to Byron

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate works by major male writers of Gothic
fiction-namely, Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis and Lord
Byron-in the context of the changing social and cultural climate of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The "male Gothic," as I will argue,
represents a kind of social performance, and it is a subgenre of fiction in which there
is a persistent engagement with questions of class and gender identity. Between
around the 1760s and the 1820s, Britain started to witness the gradual decline of
aristocratic cultural hegemony and a more vigorous self-assertion of the middle
classes, which sought to regulate aristocratic "excess." Examining the self
representation of the authors in question, alongside their morally and sexually
transgressive works, this thesis will consider the "male Gothic" as a literary category
that made possible the performance of implicitly oppositional class and gender
identities, and provided a means of resisting emergent "middle-class" ideologies and
values. Such a notion of "resistance," however, I will argue, also needs to be seen in
the context of the writers' various attempts to offer their works to the public as both
legitimate and pleasurable, and hence takes the form of an often playful vacillation
between the licensed and the subversive, rather than any more absolute and
uncompromising form of cultural opposition. Concluding by looking at the diverse
but increasingly hostile reception of Byron's work in the 1820s and 1830s, this thesis
will consider the backlash against the "male Gothic" more generally around this
time, and it will suggest that Byron's work marks the high-point and, perhaps, the
end-point of the genre