SOURCE: Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Gothic Drama as Nationalistic Catharsis.” Wordsworth Circle 31, no. 3 (summer 2000): 169-72.

In the following essay, Hoeveler examines the social and political implications of the Gothic drama's popularity.

In Spectacular Politics (1993), Paula Backsheider suggested that gothic drama is “the earliest example of … mass culture … an artistic configuration that becomes formulaic and has mass appeal, that engages the attention of a very large, very diverse audience, and that stands up to repetition, not only of new examples of the type but production of individual plays” (150). But what is repeated in the gothic drama, and how were those repetitions—often excessive, hyperbolic, blatantly fantastical—manipulated so that the genre gained mass appeal? This essay examines the social and political ideologies that are explicit in the major gothic dramatic adaptations of the most popular gothic novels of the period: Lewis's Castle Spectre, a loose adaptation of Walpole's Castle of...