Horror and Humour in the Male Gothic: Parodic Dialogues with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and the Early Nineteenth-Century Literary Market, c. 1796-1850

Since Ellen Moers coined the concept of the female Gothic in 1974, numerous studies have
been dedicated to exploring the subcategory of the genre, expanding and propagating the notion
that, beginning with Ann Radcliffe’s romances in the 1790s, a distinctive female-focused
branch of the Gothic dominates the genre from the eighteenth century to the present day. The
implicit partner to this notion is the male Gothic, but this subcategory is lacking the same
rigorous research. This thesis redresses the balance by conducting an analysis of first-wave
Gothic novels from the 1790s through to the mid-nineteenth century, developing what has thus
far been cursorily deemed characteristic of the male Gothic.
Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is considered to have been the founding text of the
male Gothic. Violent, voyeuristic, and visceral in nature, Lewis flaunts the supernatural and
sexual taboos that Radcliffe and her ilk only implied, parodying generic conventions and
satirising social institutions. By engaging in extended comparative literary analyses, I argue
that Gothic novels engaged in a dialogic exchange with Lewis’s founding text, capitalising on
the notoriety of The Monk to meet a rising market demand that was shifting from an interest in
the Radcliffean ‘Terror’ Romance to the Lewisite ‘Horror’ novel. I analyse the crossovers
between horror and humour in male Gothic literature from the late-eighteenth century to the
mid-nineteenth century, focusing on pulp and popular texts as well as selected canonical texts
to assert the importance of understanding the dialogic exchange between narratives of horror
and the rise of culture for the masses. I draw on theories of parody and the grotesque to address
the relationship between horror, gender, and sexuality, and the points at which they intersect to
satirise societal norms.