SOURCE: “Pictures to the Heart: The Psychological Picturesque in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene in the Centennial Year of the University of Southern California, University Press of Virginia, 1984, pp. 434-41.

In the following essay, Hagstrum considers Radcliffe's Udolpho as a “pictorialist” novel, declaring that the author deftly balances the narrative between the sublimes of beauty and terror with the result being an analogous exploration of Emily's burgeoning sensuality.

The term pictorial is often used as a synonym for graphic, visual, scenic, or sensuous. In his analysis of renditions of reality in Western literature, Erich Auerbach is concerned with the pictorial in this sense, making it the source of important literary value. Failure for him is to be “dry and unvisualized,” while success lies in being sensory and pictorial. To write with circumstantial detail is to write “plastically”; the...