Article: Gothic enlightenment: contagion and community in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn.(Critical essay)

The term "gothic" is surely one of literary criticism's most elastic concepts. As either a generic category or a set of textual conventions, it can define the foundational crimes of the nation, unveil authorial intention in psychobiographical form, or relate a mythic struggle of Manichean proportions. (1) These theoretical paradigms, all of which identify the American gothic as an expression of guilt, have a common source in Leslie Fiedler, whose greatest legacy to the field of gothic criticism has arguably been his combination of depth psychology and historiography. Ever since Fiedler first turned Indian slaughter, revolutionary patricide, and the slave trade into the ...

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