Corps de l’article
Since its first publication in March 1796, The Monk has never ceased to attract and repel readers or to enthrall and infuriate critics. Even its first audience sensed that The Monk was a new strain of Gothic novel whose lurid horrors, strident supernaturalism, satanic pomp, and sexually explicit episodes were merely a facade for the deeper cultural and political fears of a dying age of reason. The Monk's first critics and reviewers, no doubt secretly excited by Lewis's violation of all artistic constraints, condemned the novel on grounds of immorality and salaciously bad taste but read The Monk enthusiastically and with clandestine enjoyment, as the famous Coleridge review of February 1797 clearly suggests.
The book that would live in infamy was of no intellectual interest or value whatsoever to critics or literary historians throughout the nineteenth century, although The Monk maintained a large underground readership. Together with other ostracized works of Gothic fiction, The Monk 's notoriety and inspirational energy drew readers as diverse as Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Pushkin, and Anthony Trollope. In 1839, Lewis's first biographer, Mrs. Margaret Cornwall Baron-Wilson, provided the essential details of Lewis's life and writing that would later give rise to the serious study of The Monk in the twentieth century. From its underground status as forbidden book and decadent literary curio, The Monk would eventually gain critical prominence, if not regard, with scholars of romanticism, the psychological novel, cultural history, semiotics, and, more recently, Foucaultian analysis and feminist thought and theory.
Today, stimulated by the renaissance in Gothic studies in general, interest in The Monk and the other Gothics of the 1790s has never been higher. The accompanying bicentenary bibliography verifies this interest and is intended to serve as a critical backdrop for the essays. By graphing shifts in critical taste and directing readers of The Monk to the prolific and expanding primary and secondary sources on the novel the bibliography confirms the values and pleasures of this key Gothic text. Designed to be consulted sequentially, the bibliography conducts a census of contemporary and historical criticism appearing in books, monographs, scholarly journals, and doctoral dissertations, with the eleven individual sections containing complete and compendious data except for Section VII, "Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Editions of The Monk " and Section IX, "Chapbooks, Shilling Shocker Condensations, and Plagiarized Abridgements of The Monk ," which are selectively compiled and annotated. The exact or even approximate number of Monk plagiarisms, chapbook and bluebook condensations, and dramatic adaptations is a large one and could probably constitute a separate area of bibliographical inquiry. Entries are current to 1995 with some work appearing in 1996 also included.
Attesting to the lurid fascination and literary importance of The Monk for both specialists and generalists as well as devotees of the Gothic of every kind, the essays commemorate and celebrate the influence and impact of Lewis's enduring Gothic achievement.
I. Bibliographical and Biographical Sources
BARON-WILSON, Mrs. Margaret Cornwall. The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Author of"The Monk," 'Castle Spectre," etc. with Many Pieces in Prose and Verse Never Before Published. London: Henry Colburn, 1839.
A two-volume work presenting Lewis's unpublished writings, tales, verse, translations, and selected letters. Although occasionally erroneous (e.g. "'The Monk' was published in the summer of 1795"), still a valuable biographical source. Chapter 6 of volume 1, "'The Monk'-Romantic Fiction" (pp. 151-178) asserts that morbid public taste accounts for "how Ambrosio came to be so universally tolerated. In the inclination of the public appetite for extravagance which had been reawakened by a host of bad imitators of the Radcliffe school, we find a solution for the problem of the great success of 'The Monk.'
CHURCH, Elizabeth. "A Bibliographical Myth," Modern Philology 19 (1922): 307-314.
On the confusion of authorship over Tales of Terror and Tales of Wonder . Tales of Wonder contains pieces by Lewis, Scott, and Southey, but Tales of Terror offers "conclusive internal evidence that the author was not M. G. Lewis."
FISHER, Benjamin Franklin IV. "Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818): British," The Gothic's Gothic: Study Aids to the Tradition of the Tale of Terror. New York: Garland, 1988, pp. 28-33.
Has 34 briefly annotated entries. The latest critical entry is for 1975.
FRANK, Frederick S. "Matthew Gregory 'Monk' Lewis," Guide to the Gothic: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticisrn. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984, pp. 87-98.
Has 76 annotated entries.
FRANK, Frederick S. "Matthew Gregory 'Monk' Lewis," Gothic Fiction. A Masterfist of Twentieth-Century Criticism and Research. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1987, pp. 31-36.
Has 80 unannotated entries.
FRANK, Frederick S. The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, pp. 208-214.
Critical synopses of The Monk , The Bravo of Venice , The Wood Daemon , and Romantic Tales.
FRANK, Frederick S. Guide to the Gothic II: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1983-1993. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press/UPA, 1995, pp. 125-137.
Has 45 annotated entries.
FRANK, Frederick S. "The Monk After Two Hundred Years, 1796-1996: A Bicentenary Bibliography," Bulletin of Bibliography, 52:3 (1995): 241-260.
Has 302 annotated entries.
L. . .VY, Maurice. "Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk Bibliographie selective et critique," Bulletin de la Société d'. . .tudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, 21 (1985): 69-83. ["Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk Selective and Critical Bibliography"]
An annotated selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
MAGNIER, Mireille. "Lewis planteur aux indes occidentales." Mythes, Croyances et Religions dans le Monde Anglo-Saxon, 4 (1986): 109-116. ["Lewis, West Indian Planter"]
A biographical profile of Lewis in the West Indies. Remarks on the compilation of his Journal of a West Indian Proprietor .
MC NAMEE, Lawrence F. "Monk Lewis and the Gothic Novel," Dissertations in English and American Literature. Theses Accepted by American, British, and German Universities, 1865-1964. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1968.
Lists dissertations on Gothic subjects including Lewis and The Monk.
MC NUTT, Dan J. "Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818)," The Eighteenth Century Gothic Novel. An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Selected Texts. New York and London: Garland, 1975, pp. 226-264.
Has 138 annotated critical entries covering all of Lewis's works.
"'MONK' Lewis," Southern Literary Messenger (April 1849): 230-235.
An unsigned biographical sketch of Lewis accompanied by the poem "The Maniac." Insists upon The Monk's immorality.
MOSS, Walter. "M. G. Lewis and Madame de Staël: English Studies 34 (1953): 109-112.
Examines the efforts of the two literary figures to introduce German strains into English letters. Negates the importance and value of The Monk by dismissing it as a series of "puerile effusions."
PECK, Louis F. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Authoritative biography of Lewis. Chapter 2 (pp. 19-42) is devoted to the publication history, reception, and enduring value of The Monk . "Lewis's narrative technique has faults, but he obviousiy took pains with the structure of the romance. The theme remains the progress of Ambrosio's moral corruption."
RENTSCH, Max. Matthew Gregory Lewis: Mit besonderer berücksichtigung seines romans "Ambrosio: or, the Monk.". Leipzig, Germany: Pöschel und Trepte, 1902. [Matthew Gregory Lewis: With Special Consideration of His Novel "Ambrosio: or, The Monk"]
An early twentieth century biography prone to factual errors and drawing heavily on Mrs. Cornwall Barron-Wilson's The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis.
SPECTOR, Robert Donald. "Schauer-Romantik: Matthew Gregory Lewis and William Beckford," The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983, pp. 153-203.
A bibliographic essay with accompanying bibliography that pairs the two Schauerromantik Gothicists. Discusses the attacks of the early reviewers and contemporary criticism. "Recent articles on The Monk [through 1982] suggest the major development in the mature criticism accompanying an upsurge of interest in the Gothic."
SUMMERS, Montague. "Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)" A Gothic Bibliography. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964, pp. 96-99.
Lists and classifies all the known works of Lewis together with chapbook reductions and parodies of The Monk . Also comments on Lewis's work as a translator.
THOMAS, William. "They Called Him 'Monk'," Personlist 47 (1966): 81-90.
A succinct biographical portrait of the "strange and strange-looking figure, small and goggle-eyed" who wrote the shocker of the period. Although The Monk is "without literary merit by any standard, it is a fascinating book. Readers who are not repelled are likely to be carried spellbound with the story galloping to its stupendous denouement."
TODD, William B. "The Early Editions and Issues of The Monk, with a Bibliography," Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 2 (1949): 3-24.
Untangles the snarled publication history of the first edition of The Monk . Although the year 1795 is sometimes cited, "the actual first published issue was withheld for some reason until March 1796 when it officially appeared with new title leaves."
TRACY, Ann. B. The Gothic Novel 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1981, pp. 100-106.
Synopses of The Monk, The Bravo of Venice, Feudal Tyrants, The Isle of Devil, Romantic Tales, and The Wood Daemon.
TRACY, Ann B. "M. G. Lewis," Supernatural Fiction Writers, ed. E. F Bleiler. New York: Scribner's, 1985, vol. 1, pp. 153-160.
A profile of Lewis emphasizing his comic genius as well as his Gothic skills. Judges The Monk to be "a touchstone for decades of horror Gothic. The novel's erotic passages are appreciably steamy even yet."
WILLIS, Nathaniel Parker. "The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis," Corsair (June 15, 1839): 222-223.
Reviews the Lewis's letters as collected and edited by Mrs. Cornwall Barron-Wilson. His Gothic excesses "startled even the readers of Mrs. Radcliffe.'
II. Books on The Monk
CONGER, Syndy M. Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Disputes the traditional claim of a major influence by German Sturm und Drang on the work of Lewis and Maturin and reassesses the validity of such a claim, concluding that the Germanic strain was much less powerful than usually suspected in The Monk and Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer.
GUTHKE, Karl. Englische Vorromantik und deutscher Sturm und Drang. M. G. Lewis' Stellung in der Geschichte des deutsch-englischen Literaturbeziehungen. Göttingen, West Germany: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht; Band 223, 1958. [English Preromanticism and German Storm and Stress: M. G. Lewis's Position in the History of German-Engilish Literary Relations]
The monograph studies Lewis as the key figure in Anglo-German literary relations. His wide knowledge of German literature and fluency in German enabled him to transmit storm and stress tendencies to the English Gothic novel of the 1790s.
IRWIN, Joseph James. M. G. "Monk' Lewis . New York: Twayne; Twayne English Authors Series number 198, 1976.
The book consists of six chapters on the life and writings of Lewis: 1. "Writer and Humanitarian; 2. "The Monk "; 3. "Success and Failure in the Theater"; 4. "Poems from Many Sources"; 5. "The Journal. A Humanitarian Document'; 6. "Lewis and His Achievement." Chapter 2 on The Monk has eight subsections: I. "The Story of The Monk "; II. "The Wandering Jew"; III. "News of Agnes"; IV. "Accusations and Attacks"; V. "Expurgation of The Monk "; VI. "Exorcism and Sorcery"; VII. "Ambrosio and Matilda"; VIII. "Other Characters and Devices."
MAC DONALD, D.L. Reversal, Repression, and Revenge in The Monk: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies/Travaux choisis de la Société Canadienne d. . .tude du Dix-huitieme Siècle, XII, eds. Henri Mydlarski, David Oakleaf. Edmonton: Academic, 1993.
A conference monograph.
PARREAUX, André. The Publication of the Monk. A Literary Event 1796-1798. Paris: M. Didier, 1960.
A solid study of the publication history and the shock waves caused by The Monk . Also places the novel's characters and themes in the revolutionary context of the 1790s and shows how this "literary event" shaped both Lewis's reputation and the form of subsequent Gothic fiction.
RENO, Robert Princeton. The Gothic Visions of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Studies the interrelationship between Ann Radcliffe's optimistic and sentimental Gothic and M. G. Lewis's pessimistic and cynical Gothic. Just as The Monk was a rebuttal of her Gothic values, so The Italian was a repudiation of Lewis's darker views of society and human intelligence.
III. Book Chapters, Essays in Collections, and Sections of Books on The Monk
ACHILLES, Jochen. "Gothic und mystery fiction als modell der darstellung moralischer, politischer, und religiöser ambivalenz," Sheridan Le Fanu und die schauerromantische Tradition: Zur Psychologischen funktion der motivik von sensationsroman und geistergeschichte. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr, 1991, pp. 46-88. ["Gothic and Mystery Fiction as Model of the Representation of Moral, Political, and Religious Ambivalence"]
Discusses the influence of the psychological content of the early Gothic on the themes and characterization of Sheridan Le Fanu. Chapter 2 relates The Monk to the schauerromantik element in Sheridan Le Fanu's ghostly tales.
ALBERTAZZA, Silvia. Il Sogno gotico: Fantasia onirica a coscienza femminile da Horace Walpole a Charlotte Brontë. lmola, Italy: Galeati, 1980, pp. 51-69.
Examines 'Monk'' s sexual dreams and nightmares in the context of Gothic fantasy.
ANDERSON, Howard. "Gothic Heroes," The English Hero, 1660-1800, ed. Robert Folkenflik. Newark: Delaware UP, 1982, pp. 205-221.
Argues that "Gothic dualism of passion and remorse reaches its apogee in The Monk . Ambrosio's self-destruction is not caused by revolt against the established order; indeed it may be said to happen because he does not revolt enough."
ANDRIANO, Joseph D. "The Feminine in The Monk From Sublime Madonna to Bleeding Nun; Matilda and the Madonna; The Bleeding Nun," Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993, pp. 31-45.
Sees the novel as "more important historically than artistically. It does not work as a whole but it works very well in parts."
ARNAUD, Pierre. "Le Double dans le roman gothique: The Monk de Matthew Gregory Lewis," Le Double dans le Romanticisme Anglo-Américain,. Clermont-in Ferrand, France: Faculté des Lettres & Sciences Humaines de l'Université de Clermont-Ferrand II, 1984, pp. 131-142. ["The Double in the Gothic Novel: The Monk of Matthew Gregory Lewis"]
Compares the Doppelgänger or twin theme in The Monk to the double in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and relates the theme to self-fragmentation.
ARNAUD, Pierre. "Au service de Lucifer: Le diable, la magie, et le pacts dans Le Moine de M. G. Lewis," Maître et Serviteur dans le Monde Anglo-Américain des XVIIe etXVIIIe Siècles. Paris: Didier; Publications de l'Université de Rouen, 1985, pp. 133-151. ["In the Service of Lucifer: The Devil, Magic, and the Pact in The Monk of M. G. Lewis"]
Soul-selling and the Faustian contract with Satan establish evil as the prime mover of this Gothic novel's universe.
BAKER, Ernest. "The Novel of Sentiment and the Gothic Romance: The Gothic Novel," The History of the English Novel. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1924-1939, vol. 5, pp. 205-211.
Finds The Monk to be worth reading and praises "the daring and frankness with which he describes his demons and putrefying corpses and human bodies frenzied with lust."
BARIDON, Michel. "Les Figures du corps et leur rapport à 1'espace dans The Monk de Lewis," Les Figures du corps dans la littérature et la peinture anglaises et américaines de la renaissance à nos jours, ed. Bernard Brugière. Paris: Pres. de la Sorbonne, 1991, pp. 81-92. ["The Figures of the Body and Their Relationship to Space in Lewis's The Monk"]
Studies images of bodily enclosure in The Monk in relation to architectural and spatial confinement. Relates these situations to the Gothic's psychology of closed or dangerous space.
BAYER-BERENBAUM, Linda. "Literary Gothicism," The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1982. pp. 19-46.
Mentions The Monk 's "gory explicitness" In the novel "we see strict piety suddenly change to sadism ."
BEERS, Henry A. "The German Tributary," A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt, 1926, pp. 404-418.
Comments favorably on the artistic value of The Monk and its beneficial influence on Scott and Byron. "The Monk is not a wholly contemptible work. There is a certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of The Castle of Otranto."
BELSEY, Catherine. "The Romantic Construction of the Unconscious," 1789: Reading, Writing, Revolution: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1981, ed. Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson, Jennifer Stone. Colchester, UK: University of Essex, 1982, pp. 67-80.
Examines Lewis's Monk, Walpole's Castle of Otranto, and Wordsworth's Prelude as variant expressions of the unconscious. Contrasts the Gothic vision with its transcendental counterpart.
BIRKHEAD, Edith. "The Novel of Terror: Lewis and Maturin," The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance [1921]. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963, pp. 63-93.
Acknowledges Lewis's relentless narrative power but criticizes the portrayal of Ambrosio's fall. "The deterioration in Ambrosio's character—though Lewis uses all his energy in striving to make it appear probable by discussing the effect of the environment—is too swift."
BRUHM, Steven. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1994, pp. 129-136.
Explores Lewis's ambivalence toward the French Revolution in The Monk. "In the anti-Jacobin novel The Monk, anesthesia plays a literal role in the moral destruction which Burke had most feared."
CAVALIERO, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 28-29.
Briefly discusses the narrative pace of the novel. "The one [Gothic] ingredient lacking in The Monk is genuine mystery; the pace of the narrative is such that there is no opportunity for contemplation, even for contemplation of iniquity."
CLERY. E.J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 144-145.
Identifies several dramatic adaptations of The Monk including Aurelio and Miranda, produced at Drury Lane in December 1798.
CONGER, Syndy M. "Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe's Answer to Lewis's The Monk," Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham. New York: AMS Press, 1989, pp. 113-149.
Designates Radcliffe's The Italian to be "The first significant literary protest against The Monk." Because of The Monk's excesses, 'The Italian articulates with unusual forcefulness the utopian vision of the feminine sentimental ethic."
CONRAD, Horst. Die Literarische Angst des Schreckliche in Schauerromantik und Detektivgeschichte. Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1974, pp. 34-37
Notes The Monk's importance in the literature of angst and regards Gothicism as the first formal expression of angst in the novel.
DAVIS, Gabriele A. Wittig. "Der Mönch: Or, A Moral Point of View?" Deutsche Romantik and English Romanticism, ed. Theodore G. Gish, Sandra G. Frieden. Munich, West Germany: Fink, 1984, pp. 6-16.
Concerns German translations of The Monk and their revisions of the original.
DAY, William Patrick. "The Gothic Themes: The Monk," In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp.121-124.
Interprets the novel's violent events as reflective of "the failure and breakdown of the family." There is also a blurring of domestic identity roles since "Ambrosio is alienated from his feminine nature which is masculinized in Matilda and destroyed in Antonia."
DIAS-MARQUES, Jose Joaquim. "Une Ballade gothique anglaise dans la tradition orale de Tras-os-Montes', Littérature Orale Traditionnelle Populaire Paris: Calouste Gulbenkian, Centre Cultural Portugais, 1987, pp. 257-299. ["An English Gothic Ballad in the Oral Tradition of the Transmontane"]
Compares "Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine," one of the poems in the text of The Monk, to the Portuguese folk ballad, "Afonso a Angelina."
DORNER-BACHMANN, Hannelotte. "Auswertung Gothic Novel und wirkungsästhetik; Die Gothic novel und die frage der wertung Erzählstruktur und Texttheorie: Zu der Grundlagen e. Erzähistheorie unter besonderer analytischer Berücks. des Märchens und der Gothic Novel. Hildesheim, West Germany: Georg Olms, 1979, pp. 584-704. ["Evaluation-Gothic Novel and Operative Aesthetic; The Gothic Novel and the Question of Value"]
A semiotic study of the origins and development of Gothic fiction, including The Monk. Also evaluates the success of Lewis's Gothic along with other Gothic novels in Chapter 4, "Auswertung-Gothic Novel und wirkungsästhetik; Die Gothic Novel und die frage der wertung" ["Evaluation-Gothic Novel and Working Aesthetic; The Gothic Novel and the Question of Value']
ELLIS, Kate Ferguson. "The Outsider's Revenge: Matthew Gregory Lewis," The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subdivision of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989, pp. 131-150.
The Monk explodes the middle-class dream of "an inviolable home. The culture of separate spheres urges the man to heights of sadism, the woman into a complimentary victimization."
FERGUSON, Mary. "Ambrosio: or, the Monk," Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, ed. Frank Magill. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1983, 1, pp. 36-41.
The Monk is unique among the Gothic novels because it "revolutionized the Gothic genre. Lewis broke with the norm for romance, and the break never healed."
FIEDLER, Leslie. "Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic," Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960, pp. 109-116.
Refers to The Monk as a "sadist farrago" that establishes the major themes of the Gothic and depicts 'Ihe individual in a society where all communal systems of value have collapsed
FIEROBE, Claude. "Le Moine gothique ou la parodie du sacré," Aspects du sacre dans la littérature anglo-américaine. Reims, France: Publications du Centre Recherche sur l'imaginaire dans les Littératures du Langue Anglaise, 1979, pp. 33-45. ["The Gothic Monk and the Parody of the Sacred"]
Character analyses of several Gothic monks, including Ambrosio. Although their deeds are hideous, these characters are finally to be sympathized with since they are victims of a warped religious impulse and restrictive society.
FIEROBE, Claude. "Eros Médusé," Eros-Science Fiction Fantastique: Actes du XIe colloque du cerli [26-27 January 1990], ed. Roger Bozzetto, Max Duperray, Alain Chareyre-Melan. Aix-le-Provence, France: Université de Provence, 1991, pp. 10-11. ["Eros Stupified"]
Comments briefly on the brutalization of sex in The Monk .
FOGLE, Richard. "The Passions of Ambrosio," The Classic British Novel, ed. Howard M. Harper, Charles Edge. Athens: Georgia University Press, 1972, pp. 36-50.
Explains the psychomachia or soul-struggle of the Gothic hero-villain in terms of Aristotle's criteria for the tragic hero in The Poetics . "Ambrosio's ignorance of this identity leads him, like Oedipus, unwittingly into incest and parricide."
FRANK, Frederick S. "The Gothic Romance, 1762-1820, '' Horror Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide, ed. Marshall B. Tymn. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1981, pp. 24-28.
Places The Monk in the general context of Gothic fiction at the end of the eighteenth century "Lewis's ugly eroticism, his sadistic picture of society, and his allegiance to supernatural horror became the accepted conventions of Gothic fiction after the publication of The Monk in 1796.
FRANK, Frederick S. "The Early Gothic, 1762-1824," Horror Literature: A Reader's Guide, ed. Neil Barron. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990, pp. 3-57.
Frequents mentions The Monk in connection with many other Gothic texts.
GEARY, Robert F. "The Monk. 'Mysterium Horrendum; Desacralized Gothic: Lewis and Godwin," The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief and Literary Change. Lampeter, Wed, Wales UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, pp. 60-69.
Discusses Lewis's "distinctive use of the supernatural In The Monk , the "providential context dissolves entirely exposing a most primitive form of the numinous-daemonic dreed."
GEARY, Robert F. "M. G. Lewis and Later Gothic Fiction: The Numinous Dissipated," State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, ed. Nicholas Ruddick. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 75-81,
A brief discussion of The Monk's impact on later supernatural fiction that continued the theme of demonic dread.
GOLLER, Karl Heinz. "Romance" und "Novel": Die Anfange des Englischen Romans. Sprache und Literatur: Regensburger Arbeiten zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Regensburg, West Germany: Carl, 1972, pp.224-231.
Although The Monk is a Gothic romance, its fantastic and supernatural elements lead back to earlier romance forms in medieval literature.
GOSE, Elliot B. "The Monk," Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth Century Novel. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1972, pp. 19-40.
Reads certain episodes as a Gothicist's version of the hero's descent into the dark underworld in which the symbolism of a return to the womb becomes a return to the tomb. "This fact aligns the novel with an important subpattern that develops when the mythic success pattern is frustrated."
GOURNAY, Jean-François. "Erotisme, sadisme et perversion dans The Monk," L'Erotisme en Angleterre XVIIe-XV111e Siècles. Lille: PU de Lille, 1992, pp. 77-84. ["Eroticism, Sadism, and Perversion in The Monk"]
Shows how The Monk shares themes, characterization, and situation with Sade's Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue.
HAGGERTY, George E. "Fact and Fancy in the Gothic Novel," Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989, pp. 24-27.
By concentrating on the horrid and disgusting Lewis "attempts to offer a new rationale for fictive expression and challenges the limits of realism." The result is a new Gothic novel paradigm.
HAGGERTY, George E. "The Gothic Novel, 1764-1824," The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia UP, 1994, pp. 220-246.
Places The Monk in a Foucaultian perspective. "The pathologization of pleasure has its fictional equivalent in a novel like The Monk, in which sexuality becomes a form of public madness."
HART, Francis R. "The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel," Experience in the Novel, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968, pp. 85-105.
Recognizes "The complexity of character exposition" in The Monk. The novel dramatizes "the dreadful sublime shock to one's complacently enlightened idea of human character."
HARWELL, Thomas Meade. The English Gothic Novel. A Miscellany. 4 vols. Salzburg, Austria: Universität Salzburg, 1986.
Volume 4 reprints several pieces of criticism on The Monk, including K. S. Guthke, "Johann Karl August Musäus and M. G. Lewis" and Fernand Baidensperger, "Le Moine de Lewis dans liftérature française."
HEIM, William J. "Matthew Gregory Lewis," Critical Survey of Long Fiction, ed. Frank Magill. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1983, 4, pp. 1661-1667.
Regards The Monk as a "scandalous example of the Gothic novel." Lewis's book is the highest of high Gothics because "magic works; ghosts are real and interfere with human destiny; demons interact with men, and Satan himself, as deus ex machina, finally resolves the plot."
HENNESSY, Brendan. "The Gothic Novel: The Gothic Genre," British Writers, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. New York: Scribner's, 1980, Vol. 3, pp. 331-334.
A perfunctory discussion of the novels place in literary history. Sees Lewis as "the first author to see huge potential in Gothic subject matter." He capitalized on a sudden resurgence of interest in monastic brutality and the revival of the Inquisition.
HILLIARD, Raymond F. "Desire and the Structure of Eighteenth Century Fiction," The Country Myth: Motifs in the British Novel from Defoe to Smollett, ed. George Hahn. Frankfort, Germany: Peter Lang, 1991, pp.174-176.
Comments briefly on The Monk's triadic plot structure as reflective of various forms of desire.
HOWARD, Jacqueline. "Anticlerical Gothic: Matthew Lewis's The Monk," Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp.183-237.
A theoretical study with five subsections on the novel: "The Preface to The Monk and Lewis's Claim to Authorship"; "Discourses of Taste and Sensibility in The Monk"; "The Function of the Discourses of the Sublime and Fantastic in The Monk"; "The Reception of The Monk"; "The Italian as Fictional Response to The Monk." Repeats the critical view that The Monk's anticlericalism "goes beyond exposing the supposed hypocrisy and moral corruption of the Catholic Church to suggest that no justice or succour can be had from a divine, supernatural realm at all."
HOWELLS, Coral Ann. "M. G. Lewis, The Monk," Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction. London: Athlone Press, 1979, pp. 62-79.
Evaluates The Monk's power as a subversive text dealing in "Gothic neurosis." The feelings with which the novel is concerned "go far deeper than the confines of Radcliffean sensibility."
HUSHAHN, Helga. "Sturm und Drang in Radcliffe and Lewis," Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, eds. Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, Jane Stevenson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, pp. 89-98.
A source study of German influences on The Monk.
IDE, Hiroyuki. "Gendai Igirisu; u Genso Shosetsu to Goshikku," Shiro to Memai: Goshikku o Yomu. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1982, pp. 119-138. ["The Role of Illusion in Gothic Fiction"]
On a variety of spectral events, both real and imagined, in the novels of Walpole, Radcliffe, Beckford, Lewis, and other Gothic writers.
JOHNSON, Anthony. "Gaps and Gothic Sensibility; Walpole, Lewis, Mary Shelley. and Maturin," Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, eds. Valeria Tinkler Viviana, Peter Davidson, Jane Stevenson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, pp. 7-24.
Includes The Monk as part of a genre study of Gothic sensibility.
KARL, Frederick R. "Matthew Lewis: The Monk (1796), Gothic, Gothicism, Gothicists," The Adversary Literature: The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974, pp. 252-258.
Identifies The Monk's central theme as "passion in a man who is as rigid as the cathedrals in which he preaches. The novel is a tale of opposites, of conflicting forces running within Ambrosio which he must dam up to survive."
KAUHL, Gudrun. "Myths of Enclosure and Myths of the Open in The Monk and Wuthering Heights," Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, eds. Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, Jane Stevenson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, pp. 183-196.
Comparative study of the use of space in The Monk and Wuthering Heights.
KENDRICK, Walter. "Stages of Fear: Explicitness," The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, pp. 103-108.
A superficial discussion of The Monk's place in the fear tradition. States that "The Monk broke all the horrid genres rules before they had been formed."
KIELY, Robert. "The Monk: Matthew Gregory Lewis," The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972, pp. 98-117.
Analyzes the place of The Monk among other romantic novels of its period and refers to its "intensely private vision of a character in extreme circumstances. Lewis's final vision is of a chaos which neither man nor art has the capacity to control or avoid."
KOHL, Norbert. "Der Schurke als opfer: Verteufelte sinnlichkeit in Lewis' Roman Der Mönch," Der Mönch, trans. Friedrik Polokovics. Frankfurt am Main, 1986, pp. 527-547. ["The Villain as Victim: Satanic Sensibility in Lewis's Novel The Monk"]
Discusses the divided nature of the hero-villain Ambrosio in the context of the romantic prototype of the tormented tormentor.
LE BRUN, Annie. "'à flanc d'abîme . . . Le Château étoilé,"' Les Châteaux de la subversion. Paris: J. J. Pauvert aux Editions Gamier Frères, 1982, pp. 78-119. ["'On the Side of the Abyss . . . The Castle of Destiny"']
Relates The Monk to the surrealist theories and work of André Breton and comments on the subversive characteristics of the Gothic novel in depicting "the uprooted darkness of which we are made."
L. . .VY, Maurice. "M. G. Lewis et ses demons," Le Roman "gothique' anglais, 1764-1824. Toulouse, France: Association de Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, 1968, pp. 305-382; Rpt. Paris: Arlin Michel, 1995. ["M. G. Lewis and His Demons"]
Traces the genesis of The Monk and Lewis's use of various terror sources. Valuable for its analysis of The Monk as the ne plus ultra of high Gothic fiction, a book that was often imitated but never duplicated. "Ce qui, sans doubts, constitue l'originalité profonde du Moine, c'est la manière directs de brutale dont le lecteur est confronté avec I'nvisible, sans truchements ni médiations d'aucune sorte. Ici point de ménagements, point d'égards pour les esprits raisonneurs ou lea sensibilités ombrageuses le surnaturel fait sauvagement irruption et s'impose." ["That which, without doubt, constitutes the profound originality of The Monk, is the direct manner of brutishness by which the reader is confronted with the invisible, with neither interpretations nor mediations of any sort. At this point of cautiousness, at this point of regard for the spirit of reason or suspicious sensibility the supernatural makes savage eruption and superimposes itself"]
L. . .VY, Maurice. "Le Moine (1796)," Roman et Société en Angleterre au XVIIIe Siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1978, pp. 197-231. ["The Monk (1796)"]
Reviews and analyzes the novel's themes of sadism, erotic aberration, social cataclysm, and supernatural horror. In The Monk, the supremacy of the malign supernatural cannot be avoided or denied.
LOVECRAFT, Howard Phillips. "The Apex of Gothic Romance," Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). New York: Dover Books, 1973, pp. 30-35.
Maintains that "[horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis. He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffean tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel."
MAC ANDREW, Elizabeth. "Characters—The Split Personality," The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 86-93.
Emphasizes the sexual crimes that empower the Gothic novel. Incestuous rape and matricide reveal the repressed nature of Ambrosio and the distortion of his natural drives. "He first denies his own nature, and then drives his natural impulses to unnatural extremes."
MADOFF, Mark S. "Inside, Outside, and the Gothic Locked Room Mystery," Gothic Fiction: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham. New York: AMS Press, 1989, pp. 49-62.
The locked room functions as both a terrible Gothic space and a metaphor with sexual significance. "In The Monk, a locked room almost always defines a boundary between sexual repression and sexual rapaciousness."
MAGNIER, Mireille. "Zofloya et Le Moine," Autour de l'idée de nature: Histoire des idées et civilisation: Pedagogie et divers. Paris: Didier, 1977, pp. 227-231.
Compares and contrasts the highly similar horror techniques and attitudes toward the supernatural of Lewis in The Monk to Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor, a Romance of the Fifteenth Century (1806).
MANCA, Mario. Presuppositi morali nelia letteratura gotica inglese. Sassari, Italy: Libreria G. Dessi, 1971, pp 55-61.
Briefly discusses The Monk's attack upon bourgeois morality.
MC WHIR, Anne. "The Gothic Transgression of Disbelief: Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis," Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/'Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham. New York: AMS Press, 1989, pp. 29-47.
The Monk arouses strong doubts about the security of reason and the value of belief. "In The Monk, both magic and superstition are perversions of sexual energy and we are expected to suspend disapproval and well as disbelief."
MELLERSKI, Nancy Caplan, "The Exploding Matrix: The Episode of the Bleeding Nun in M. G. Lewis's Monk," Forms of the Fantastic, ed. Jan Hokenson, Howard Pearce. New York: Greenwood, 1986, pp. 41-47.
Discusses the ways in which Don Raymond's encounter with the sanguinary monastic specter is integrated with the themes of the novel as a whole.
MILES, Robert. "Avatar of Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor," Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 160-171.
The Monk is another prime example of a fragmented Gothic text that fixes upon "contradiction, ideological cruxes and the entanglements of power inherent in Gothic conventions. There is no simple thematic route through the text, only turnings, textual ambushes, and sudden shifts."
MISHRA, Vijay. "The Gothic Sublime and Literary History: Beyond the Precursor Text," The Gothic Sublime. Albany, NY: SUNY at Albany University Press, 1994, pp. 230-233.
Analyzes the grotesque and blasphemous elements in the novel as part of its dark sublimity. "Ambrosio's relationship with Matilda is explicitly connected with the violation of the madonna herself."
MORSE, David B. "The Transposition of the Gothic," Romanticism. A Structural Analysis. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982, pp. 50-103.
Sees The Monk as "an allegory of the rejection of female sexuality."
NAPIER, Elizabeth R. "Crosspurposes: The Monk, Veils and Voyeurism; Deflections of Sympathy; Disruptions of Tone; Suppression and Release," The Failure of the Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1986, pp. 112-132.
Analyzes The Monk as one of many examples of disjunction and uncertainty of thematic and formal purpose in Gothic fiction. "Though openness appears to be the moral desideratum of Lewis's book, a fascination with indirection, transference and distancing marks The Monk, and dictates its aesthetic appeal."
NICHOLS, Nina da Vinci. "Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Brontë," The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann Fleenor. Montreal, Canada: Eden Press, 1983, pp. 187-206.
Attributes to Lewis a "naturalistic depiction of the hero's descent into depravity. Lewis exploits the connections between Gothic requisites and their sexual overtones."
PAULSON, Ronald. "The Gothic: Ambrosio to Frankenstein; Rebel/Tyrant Ambrosio," Representatives of Revolution [1789-1820]. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983, pp. 215-247.
Relates the themes and characterizations of The Monk to the revolutionary upheaval and the end of the eighteenth century. "The plot of The Monk emerges to a remarkable extent from a historical referent. Ambrosio lives out a plot that had its source in the events of the Revolution and the Terror."
POLHEMUS, Robert M. "Faith, Love, and the Art of the Novel: 'The Feather Plucked from Cupid's Wing,"' Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 20-25.
Views The Monk as an antipapal diatribe, calls Lewis a prurient sensationalist, and finds the novel to be a "morally empty book."
POR. . .E, Marc. "Roman gothique et montage filmique, The Monk de M. Lewis, 1794; Actes du Second Colloque du Cicada, 5-7 decembre 1991," Montages/Collages, ed. Bertrand Rouge. Pau: Pubs. de l'Univ. de Pau, 1993, pp. 85-96.
Relates the horror episodes of The Monk to cinematic techniques.
PRAZ, Mario. "The Shadow of the'Divine Marquis"; Diffusion of the 'Persecuted Woman' Theme; M. G. Lewis and His Monk, Success of This Novel." The Romantic Agony (1933), trans. Angus Davidson. New York: Meredian Books, 1960, pp. 91-93; 192-193.
Relates The Monk to themes of "diabolical beauty" and suggests the novel's influence on French writers such as Flaubert and Baudelaire.
PRAZ, Mario. "Matthew Gregory Lewis's 'Gothic Novel': The Monk." Le Romanticisme angloaméricaine: Mélanges offerts à Louis Bonnerot. Paris: Didier, 1971, pp. 21-34.
Concentrates on the powerful sadism of The Monk as a prime aspect of "romantic agony." Lewis boldly explores the beauty inherent in horror.
PUNTER, David. "The Classic Gothic Novels: Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis," The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day. London & New York: Longman, 1980, pp.61-98.
Attributes to the novel "a terseness of style which sometimes approaches naturalism. The Monk is a very self-conscious book."
PUNTER, David. "Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction," Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham. New York: AMS Press, 1989, pp. 1-27.
The Monk and other Gothics "proved a godsend to psychoanalytically-minded critics."
RAILO, Eino. "Matthew Gregory Lewis," The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (1927). New York: Humanities Press, 1964, pp. 81-133.
One of the first biocritical statements of Lewis's life and his horror novel. Covers Lewis's entire literary career together with his friendships and influence upon other writers. Recognizes in The Monk a new Gothic tone in which the vicious passions are both real and realistically portrayed. "But everything in Lewis's book was liable to oppress its readers by a kind of new and strange, unabashed realism."
ROBERTSON, Fiona. "Gothic: Passages That Lead to Nothing; The Implicated Reader in the Drama of Terror," Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 68-116.
Traces the pronounced influence of Lewis on Sir Walter Scott. Sees The Monk as the most 'notorious product' of the Gothic movement, a book "which, with Frankenstein, has proved the text most amenable to recent politically conscious interpretation. His novel is striking as a series of interlinked but diverse reflections on key intellectual topics of the day."
SAINTSBURY, George. Tales of Mystery: Mrs. Radcliffe—Lewis—Maturin. New York: Macmillan, 1891.
Prints excerpts from The Monk and recognizes the importance of the Gothic tradition in literary history. Ambrosio is called "only a label or series of labels used to designate the perpetrator of atrocious deeds."
SCHNEIDER, Rudolf K. Der Mönch in der englischen dichtung bis auf Lewis's "Monk," 1795. Leipzig, Germany: Meyer and Müller, 1928. [The Monk in English Literature Up to Lewis's "Monk," 1795]
An archaic source that follows the changing portrayal of monastics in English fiction, including Lewis's Ambrosio. Referred to by Montague Summers as "a superficial compilation."
SHERBURN, George. "Gothic Romance and the Novel of Doctrine," A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948, pp.1192-1199.
Brief mention of The Monk in the history of the Gothic as a novel that "gives evidence of a psychopathic condition perhaps inherent in the extremes of the romantic temperament."
SUMMERS, Montague. "Matthew Gregory Lewis," The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (1938). New York: Russell and Russell, 1964, pp. 202-308.
A long chapter on Lewis's life and works replete with Summers's customary arcane effusions of knowledge, and untraceable citations. Discusses The Monk's touches of comedy, its glaring flaws, and its value as a Gothic model for those writers who would explore the limits of horror. "Mrs. Radcliffe is the romanticist of Gothic fiction; Lewis the realist. His pictures of voluptuous passion are necessary to the narrative; the violence of the orgasm but serves to balance and throw in high relief the charnel horror."
THOMPSON, G. R. "Supernatural Gothic: Gothic Fiction of the Romantic Age: Context and Mode," Romantic Gothic Tales 1790-1840. New York: Harper and Row, 1979, pp. 17-20.
Brief discussion of The Monk's contribution to the field of supernatural horror. "In a scene representative of how the Gothic world is a perversion of traditional ideals, Ambrosio moves from religious devotion before a painting of the Holy Virgin to near sexual climax."
TOMIJIMA, Takao. "Shudosha no Taihi Kozo," Shiro to Mamai: Goshikku o Yomu, eds. Shigeru Koike, Masao Shimura, Takao Tomiyama. Tokyo: Kokusho Kaniokai, 1982, pp. 374-389.
Studies the novel's unsubtle but effective contrasts of helplessness and brutality and angelic versus demonic traits in the characters.
VAN LUCHENE, Robert S. Essays in Gothic Fiction. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Considers The Monk, The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolph, and Frankenstein to be the major achievements of the Gothic period. The Monk particularly set new directions for the Gothic novel.
VARMA, Devendra P. "Schauer-Romantik: or Chambers of Horror," The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (1958). New York: Russell and Russell, 1966, pp. 129-172.
Refers to The Monk as "a romance of extraordinary fascination and power. By his brutal emphasis on gross detail, Lewis stands apart from Mrs. Radcliffe and her followers. His gift is "the negation ol reticence."
VARNADO, S. L. "The Gothic Novel," Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 1987, pp. 20-41.
Rudolf Otto's "negative numinous forms the core of Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk with the sanctus twisted into the profane."
VOLLER, Jack G. "The Yawning Gulf: Lewis, Brown and the Radical Supernatural Sublime," The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1994, pp. 61-88.
Discusses the descents, subterranean scenes, and "yawning gulfs" of the novel as images of the futility of human endeavor in a world in which God is either missing or merely a perverse demiurge. "Even the morally good characters who survive continue their lives in a theological vacuum."
WAGENKNECHT, Edward. "'Monk' Lewis and Charlotte Dacre; The Renascence of Wonder," Cavalcade of the English Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1943, pp. 122-125.
Finds The Monk to be "well put together, cleverly at least if not vitally. His style is simple and direct, without literary pretensions."
WEBER, Ingeborg. "Die romantische wende: Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, oder, der peiniger als opfer," Der Englische schauerroman: Eine einführungen. Munich, West Germany; Zurich, Switzerland: Artemis, 1983, pp. 112-126. ["The Romantic Turning Point: Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, or the Tormentor as Victim"; The English Gothic Novel: An Introduction"]
Discusses The Monk in the context of the Gothic genre's evolution from suggestive terror to blatant horror. Locates Lewis's work at the turning point from moderate Gothicism to extreme and painful horror.
WILLIAMS, Anne. "Demon Lovers. The Monk," Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995, pp. 115-120.
The novel's plot and character "are founded on patriarchal premises about the nature of the female. The danger of female power and unpredictability is personified by Matilda."
WILT, Judith. "Gothic Fathers," Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980, pp. 42-50.
Comments on Ambrosio's position as antihero and the role of riots and mobs in the novel. "The Monk as a Gothic novel centers on an almost farcically concrete sense of intrafamily lust and on the nightmarishly swift transmutations of love into hatred."
WINTER, Karl J. "Sexual/Textual Politics of Terror: Writing and Rewriting the Gothic Genre in the 1790s," Misogyny in Literature: An Essay Collection, ed. Katherine Anne Ackley. New York: Garland, 1992, pp.89-103.
A comparison of sexual themes in The Monk and Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. The Monk's erotic ugliness and sensationalism may have caused Mrs. Radcliffe to revise her sources of Gothic fear in the writing of The Italian.
IV. Articles on The Monk
ABENSOUR, Liliane. "Limites—non frontières d'une oeuvre: Le Moine de M. G. Lewis," Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, 659 (1984): 13-18. ("Limits—Not Frontiers of a Work: The Monk of Lewis"]
Studies The Monk as the prime Gothic example of unlimited psychological and surrealistic truthfulness. "Lewis n'abolit pas lea frontières qui séparent le vaisemblable." ["Lewis does not abolish any of the frontiers that separate the probable from the improbable"]
ANDERSON, Howard. "The Manuscript of M. G. Lewis's The Monk: Some Preliminary Notes," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 62 (1968): 427-434.
Comments on the discovery and condition of the original manuscript of The Monk. In the manuscript, "the destruction of the hero is described in great detail." The paper is of Dutch manufacture.
BALDENSPERGER, Fernand. "Le Moine de Lewis dans la littérature française," Journal of Comparative Literature 1 (1903): 201-219. ["Lewis's Monk in French Literature"]
Traces The Monk's influence on Prosper Merimée's Une Femme est un diable [A Woman Is a Devil]. Lewis himself had acquired elements of his demonic temptress, Matilda, from Jacques Cazotte's Le Diable amoureux [The Amorous Devil].
BAYFORD, E. G. "Lewis's Monk," Times Literary Supplement, March 28,1935, p. 216,
A letter commenting on Louis F. Peck's remarks on an early copy of The Monk in TLS, March 4,1935, p. 148. Bayford possesses one of these early editions published by J. and H. Purkess.
BROOKS, Peter. "Virtue and Terror: The Monk," Journal of English Literary History 40 (1973): 249-263.
Explicates The Monk's powerful presentation of "an ethics of terror instead of virtue." Specifically, "terror replaces the traditional idea of the sacred and the numinous." Traditional conceptions of the sacred must yield to an ethic of terror.
BROOKS, Philip. "Notes on Rare Books," New York Times Book Review, January 27,1935, p. 21.
A small contribution to the debate over the correct publication date of The Monk. There was no 1795 edition, but two editions appeared in 1796.
CARNOCHAN, W. B., and David W. DONALDSON. "The Presentation Copy of 'Monk' Lewis's 'Oberon's Henchmen' 1803," The Book Collector 30 (1981): 346-359.
On Lewis's Gothic-Shakespearean poem, "Oberon's Henchmen; or, The Legend of the Three Sisters," the terminal poem in Romantic Tales.
CHENIEUX-GENDRON, Jacqueline. "Lectures surréalistes du roman noir," Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 656 (1984): 133-146. ["Surrealistic Readings of the French Gothic Novel"]
Traces the debt of André Breton's surrealism to Lewis's Gothic novel. "L'exemple de merveilleux qua vante André Breton dans le premier Manifeste, lusts après la diatribe lancée contre le roman, C'est celui du Moine. ["The example of the marvelous that Breton praised in the first Manifesto, just after the diatribe hurled against the novel, is the one of The Monk."]
COYKENDALL, Frederick. "A Note on 'The Monk,'" Colophon, new series, 1 (1935): 87-96.
Attempts to work out a correct chronology for the various editions of The Monk published in the 1790s, from its first publication in March 1796 to its fourth and fifth editions of 1798 and 1800.
COYKENDALL, Frederick. "Lewis's Monk," Times Literary Supplement, April 25, 1935, p. 276.
Compares significant differences in the endings of the first and second editions. The second edition prolongs Ambrosio's sufferings and death for a full seven days in contrast to the first edition.
DUPERRAY, Max. "The Monk de M. G. Lewis: Fantastique et mélodrame," . . .tudes Anglaises 40 (1987): 258-266. ["The Monk of M. G. Lewis: Fantastic and Melodramatic"]
Sees The Monk as difficult to classify literarily because of its overlapping of fantasy and melodrama. The Monk exhibits "une double finalté du langage: dire la surnature (optique du gothique), dire le l'inconscient (optique du fantastique).' ["a dual finality of language: it speaks the supernatural (Gothic vision), it speaks the unconscious (fantastic vision)"]
EMERSON, Oliver Farrar. "'Monk' Lewis and the Tales of Terror," Modern Language Notes 38 (1923): 154-159.
Investigates and deciphers the tangled publication history and authorship of Tales of Terror, a collection often confused with Lewis's Tales of Wonder. This bibliographical enigma was finally settled by Morchard Bishop in "A Terrible Tangle," TLS, October 18, 1967, p. 989.
ENG, Steve. "'Ghost Riders from Germany': An Early Phase of Fantasy Poetry," Portland Review 27:2 (1981): 47-48.
Concentrates on the supernatural poetry in Lewis's Tales of Wonder. Credits Lewis with influencing the verse of Scott, which is often "tinged with the supernatural. It was in the horror-ballad workshop of Lewis that Scott learned narrative story-telling ."
FAIRCHILD, Hoxie N. "Byron and Monk Lewis," Times Literary Supplement, May 11, 1946, p. 223.
Suggests that Byron used Lewis's poem, "The Exile" from the fifth chapter of The Monk in composing Don Juan, canto 11, stanzas 18-20, "No more my arms a parent's fond embraces."
FAURE, Alain. "Du Simple au double: Du Moine de M.G. Lewis aux . . .lixirs du Diable d'E.TA. Hoffmann," Revue Lifféraire Mensuelle 659 (1984): 54-62. ["From Single to Double: From The Monk of M.G. Lewis to The Devil's Elixirs of E.TA. Hoffmann"]
Comments on Hoffmann's direct use of Lewis's novel in constructing the double life of Medardus in The Devil's Elixirs. "L'Univers en noir et blanc de Lewis deviant avac Hoffmann une fantasmagorie chatoyante. ["Lewis's universe in black and white will become with Hoffmann a florid fantasmagoria"]
FIEROBE, Claude. "La Topographie romanesque de M. G. Lewis dans The Monk," . . .tudes Anglaises 39 (1 986): 15-25. ["The Romantic Topography of M. G. Lewis in The Monk"]
Discusses the settings of the novel, including the twisted topography of the subterranean as these environments relate to the characters.
FITZGERALD, Lauren. "Gothic Properties: Radcliffe, Lewis, and the Critics," Wordsworth Circle 24 (1993): 167-170.
Shows how the "property plot" of Radcliffe's and Lewis's Gothic novels is reflected in the critical war for ownership of the Gothic genre itself currently being waged in books and articles on the subject. "The Gothic explains the criticism as much as the criticism explains the Gothic."
FONGARO, Antoine. "Baudelaire, L'Aminta et Le Moine," Bulletin Baudelairien 17 (1982): 5-8. ["Baudelaire, L'Aminta, and The Monk"]
An influential study that discusses Baudelaire's use of Tasso's pastoral L'Aminta and Lewis's The Monk in Les Fleurs du Mal.
A FRIEND of Accuracy. "M. G. Lewis," Notes & Queries 4 (1957): 389.
A paragraph-length note that rectifies several mistakes appearing in the transcription of a Lewis letter to Sir Walter Scott. See: Karl S. Guthke, "Some Unpublished Letters of M. G. Lewis," Notes & Queries 202 (1957): 217-219.
GRUDIN, Peter. "The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit," Journal of Narrative Technique 5 (1975): 136-146
A character analysis of the novel's female demon, Matilda. Her nature is seen in her mortal appeal and her satanic potency. Lewis exerts considerable artistic care "to make her a token of the succubus demon."
GUTHKE, Karl S. "Der Herkunft des weltliterarischen typus der 'Femme Fatale' aus der deutschen volkssagge," Germanisch Romanische Monatsshrift 37 (1956): 294-296. ["The Origin of the World Literary Type of the 'Femme Fatale' from the German National Legendry"]
Traces the folklore origins of the female demon Matilda in The Monk.
GUTHKE, Karl S. "C. M. Wieland and M. G. Lewis," Neophilologus 40 (1956): 231-233.
Lewis had translated Wieland's Oberon. His acquaintance with German sources and folklore "gave him a position as an outstanding introducer of contemporary German literature" to the English literary scene.
GUTHKE, Karl S. "Some Unpublished Letters of M. G. Lewis," Notes & Queries 202 (1957): 217- 219.
Gives transcriptions of three letters from Lewis to Thomas Maurice, G. Roots, and, most important, Sir Walter Scott.
GUTHKE, Karl S. "Some Bibliographical Errors concerning the Romantic Age," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 51 (1957): 159-162.
Corrects a long-standing bibliographical misconception that Lewis and Scott compiled Tales of Terror. Other bibliographical errors involve Lewis's drama, The East Indian, mistakenly thought to be derived from Kotzebue's plays.
HAGGERTY, George E. "Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis," Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 341-352.
As a homosexual novelist, Lewis presents "a gruesome picture of the nature of human experience." His homosexuality is reflected in "a desperate social vision on the one hand and a deep sense of unresolved emotional feeling."
HENNELLY, Mark M., Jr. "The Monk's Gothic Bosh and Bosch's Gothic Monks," Comparative Literature Studies 24 (1987): 146-164.
Corrects the mistaken critical assumption that The Monk's "Gothic bosh" or its absurd machinery of horror is unrelated to the novel's themes and structure. "The novel offers an integrated or at least repeated coordination of its Gothic machinery, especially the sense of place or space, and its Gothic visions."
HENNELLY, Mark M. Jr. "'Putting My Eye to the Keyhole': Gothic Vision in The Monk," Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 8 (1987): 289-305,
A structural analysis of The Monk emphasizing the active psychosymbolic role of architecture and physical place in the novel.
HERZFELD, Georg. "Eine neue quelle für Lewis' 'Monk,'" Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 104 (1900): 310-312. ["A New Source for Lewis's 'Monk'"]
The first of three source studies by Herzfeld. Claims that Lewis obtained most of The Monk from an anonymous Schauerroman, Die Blutende gestalt mit dolch und lampe: Oder die Beschwörung im schlosse stern bei prague. [The Bleeding Shape with Dagger and Lantern; Or the Oath at Castle Stem near Prague].
HERZFELD, Georg. "Die eigentliche quelle von Lewis' 'Monk,"' Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 111(1903): 316-323. ["The Exact Source of Lewis's 'Monk'"]
Herzfeld's second source study repeats the claim that Lewis took his novel from Die Blutende gestalt. Prints some parallel passages to demonstrate Lewis's borrowings.
HERZFELD, Georg. "Noch einmal die quelle von Lewis' 'Monk,'" Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 115 (1905): 70-73. ["Once Again the Source of Lewis' 'Monk'"]
Answers Otto Ritter and reasserts the claim that Lewis took much of The Monk verbatim from Die Blutende gestalt.
JANSEN, Peter K. "'Monk Lewis' und Heinrich von Kleist," Kleist Jahrbuch (1984): 25-54.
Comments on the significant influence of The Monk on Kleist's "The Marquise of 0.," "The Duel," "The Earthquake in Chile" and other tales.
JONES, Wendy. "Stories of Desire in The Monk," ELH 57 (1990):129-150.
Investigates the motive of erotic fulfillment in the stories of Raymond and Agnes, Lorenzo and Antonia, and Ambrosio and Matilda to demonstrate the novel's "repeated insistence on the alignment of narrative and desire. The Monk endorses good desire simply because it is good, even when it is transgressive or threatening to established authority."
KAMIO, Mitsuo. "Repetition and Cross-Reference: Matthew Lewis, 'The Monk,"' Nagoya Daigaku Bungakubu Kenkyu Ronshu (March 1, 1993): 293-301.
Item not seen.
KAUHL, Gudrun. "On the Release from Monkish Fetters: Matthew Lewis Reconsidered," Dutch Quarterly Review 19 (1989): 264-280.
Studies the interrelationship of incest and revolutionary philosophy in The Monk. One thematic dimension of the novel involves the ideological controversies of the 1790s.
KNOWLTON, Edgar C., Jr. "Lewis's The Monk and Tirant lo Blanch,"Notes & Queries 30 (1983): 64-65.
A note that locates a source for The Monk in the work of the Catalan novelist Joanot Martorell (1420-1470), specifically, Tirant lo Blanch.
L. . .VY, Maurice. "Le manuscrit du Moine de M. G. Lewis," Caliban 3 (1966):129-131. ["The Manuscript of Lewis's Monk"]
Dates the manuscript for the first edition of The Monk as finished on 23 September 1794 with the Preface completed on 28 October 1794. The book went on sale on 12 March 1796.
LYDENBERG, Robin. "Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M. G. Lewis's The Monk," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 10 (1 979): 65-79.
A rhetorical analysis of The Monk that centers on Lewis's astonishment at his own rhetoric. "He is threatened not so much by the power of sexual passion and the unbridled imagination as by the dangerously affective powers of literature and rhetoric."
MAC DONALD, D. L. "The Erotic Sublime: The Marvellous in The Monk," English Studies in Canada 18 (1992): 273-285.
Concerns the Burkean category of the sublime seen in the synthesis of the erotic, the brutal, the horrifying, and the supernatural in The Monk.
MADOFF, Mark S. "The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1 979): 337-350.
Contrasts the mild Gothicism of Reeve's The Old English Baron with the unrestrained supernatural Gothicism of Lewis's The Monk. Lewis's wild savagery can be traced to his pessimism and negative romantic views.
MAGNIER, Mireille. "Le Moine et les superstitions papistes," Mythes, Croyances et Religions dans le Monde Anglo-Saxon 1 (1983): 93-105. ["The Monk and Papist Superstitions"]
On Lewis's use and exploitation of lurid papist superstitions and anti-Catholic fears in the novel.
MARIGNY, Jean. "The Monk de M. G. Lewis et la pensée revolutionnaire," Cycnos (Univ. de Nice) 5 (1989): 105-112. ["The Monk of M. G. Lewis and Revolutionary Thought"]
Considers the polemical and ideological dimensions of The Monk. In what ways can The Monk be read as a statement against both autocratic authority and the perils that are inherent in revolutionary attitudes?
MARROT, H. V. "Lewis's Monk," Bibliographical Notes and Queries 1 (1935): 4.
Addresses the problem of the year of publication of The Monk. Was it published in the summer of 1795 as shown in the catalog of Archdeacon Wranghams library? "No copy is now known dated earlier than 1796."
MEYER, Michael. "Let's Talk About Sex: Confessions and Vows in The Monk," Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 20 (1995): 307-316.
Foucaultian reading of The Monk.
O'CONNOR, Robert H. "Matthew Gregory Lewis and the Gothic Ballad," Lamar Journal of the Humanities 18 (1992): 5-26.
On Lewis's remarkable aptitude as a balladeer, his exchanges with Sir Walter Scott on ballad literature, and the role of the ballad in the text of The Monk.
PECK, Louis F. "Lewis's Monk," Times Literary Supplement, March 4,1935, p. 148.
Examines the first three editions of The Monk and disputes Philip Brooks's claim that these printings are textually uniform. In the second edition, the agonies of Ambrosio have been severely curtailed.
PECK, Louis F. "The Monk and Musäus' Die Entführung," Philological Quarterly 32 (1953): 346-348.
Counters the charge that Lewis took the bleeding nun episode from Musäus's Die Entführung [The Abduction]. Cites an 1807 letter from Lewis to Scott in which he denies having read Die Entführung.
PECK, Louis F. "The Monk and Le Diable amoureux," Modem Language Notes 68 (1953): 406-408.
Defends Lewis against the charge of plagiarizing Cazotte's story in writing The Monk. "The basic theme of diabolical temptation by means of a beautiful woman was already old and widespread before Cazotte wrote."
PECK, Louis F. "An Early Copy of The Monk," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 57 (1963): 350-351.
Describes an early copy of the novel that "would appear to be a second issue of the third edition masquerading as a first edition."
PICHOIS, Claude. "Actualité du Moine," Mercure de France 234 (1958): 512-516. ["Current Interest in The Monk"]
Summarizes scholarly and popular interest in The Monk.
PICOT, Jean-Pierre. "Lewis, Hoffmann, Gogol, Gautier: Du status de l'identité au ceremonial de la mort dans le récit fantastique," Littératures 5 (1982): 19-35. ["Lewis, Hoffmann, Gogol, Gautier: On the Status of Identity in the Ceremonial of Death in Fantastic Narrative"]
A comparative study of spectacular death scenes, concentrating on the finale of Lewis's The Monk as a model for the work of various German, Russian, and French Gothicists.
POUND, Louise. "'Monk' Lewis in Nebraska," Southern Folklore Quarterly 9 (1945): 107-1 10.
"Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine," a ballad in Chapter 9 of The Monk, has a surviving version in the effects of Mrs. Harriet Stevens Wert at her Nebraska homestead. Reprints the version in Wert's possession at her death at age 91 in 1927.
RITTER, Otto. "Studien zu M. G. Lewis' roman 'Ambrosio, or, The Monk,'" Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 111 (1903): 106-121. ["Studies on M. G. Lewis's Novel 'Ambrosio, or, The Monk"']
A source study tracing scenes in Lewis's Monk to various German sources. Schiller's Geisterseher [Ghostseer, Bürger's Ballads, and Veit Weber's Teufelsbeschwörung [Satanic Oath] were used by Lewis.
RITTER, Otto. "Die Angebliche quelle von M. G. Lewis' 'Monk,'" Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 113 (1903): 56-65. ["The Overlooked Source of M. G. Lewis's 'Monk'"]
Attempts to refute Herzfeld's claim that the primary German source for The Monk is the Schauerroman Die Blutende gestalt.
RITTER, Otto. "Zu Archiv CXI11, 63 (Lewis's Monk)," Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 14, new series (1905): 167.
Challenges Herzfeld's source study, which charges that Lewis obtained much of his material from the Schauerroman Die Blutende gestalt.
ROBERTS, W. 'Lewis's Monk," Times Literary Supplement, March 14, 1935, p. 164.
A query asking about an undated copy of The Monk printed by Purkess of London. Is this copy a modern edition by G. Purkess of Soho?
ROMERO, Christiane Z. "M. G. Lewis' Monk and E.TA. Hoffmann's Die Elixiere des Teufels: Two Versions of the Gothic," Neophilologus 63 (1979): 574-582.
Compares Lewis's Ambrosio with Hoffmann's Brother Medardus. Although Hoffmann remains indebted to Lewis's criminal monk, he is not restricted by the limitations of the Gothic tradition and succeeds in creating "heightened drama and mystery" that go beyond The Monk's physical horrors.
SABBADINI, Tiziana, "The Monk di M. G. Lewis e I'Attesa de s/Velamento," Il Lettore di Provincia 15 (1984): 69-73. ("The Monk of M. G. Lewis and the Expectation of Veiling"]
On the erotic and sensational power Of the revelation and concealment scenes in the novel, such as Matilda's/Rosario's melodramatic revelation of her true sex to Ambrosio.
SCHORK, R. J. "Lewis's The Monk," Explicator 44:3 (1986): 26-29.
Explicates three areas of interest in The Monk the prominence of the word "bosom" in the novel's text; the novel's planned humor; Lewis's "deft hagiography" in choosing to frame Ambrosio's crimes against the crimes of St. Anthony.
SUMMERS, Montague. "Santon Barsisa," Notes & Queries 175 (September 3,1938):174-175.
A note on a source for The Monk. In the advertisement for the first edition of the novel, Lewis stated, "The first idea for this romance was suggested by the story of Santon [or Monk] Barsisa related in The Guardian for 31 August 1713."
SUMMERS, Montague. "The Lion of Mayfair," Everybody's Weekly, July 15, 1944, p. 6.
A short biography of the "odd author" of The Monk. Attributes Lewis's social triumphs to the scandalous success of the novel.
SVILPIS, J. E. "Coupling and Transgression in The Castle of Otranto and The Monk," Transactions of the Samuel Johnson Society of the Northwest 16 (1985): 101-106.
A comparative study of the virtuous and vile pairings in the two Gothic novels. Ambrosio and Antonia represent one kind of pairing, while Raymond and Agnes represent another.
TAYLOR, Archer. "The Three Sins of the Hermit," Modern Philology 20 (1922): 61-94.
A detailed source study of The Monk's roots in folklore and legend. Surveys the Koran, Hebrew texts, Turkish tales, Rhine legends, old French folk stories, as well as Irish and Celtic fables.
"TROLLOPE on The Monk," Nineteenth Century Fiction 4 (1949): 167.
On his copy of The Monk, Trollope scribbled: "This is so bad that nothing ever could have been worse; and yet, the book has had a great success!"
TROSTANIECKI, lgnacy. "La poétique du caché dans Le Moine de M. G. Lewis," Recherches Anglaises et Américaines 6 (1973): 43-59. ["The Hidden Poetic in M.G. Lewis's Monk"]
The novel permits its characters multiple levels of awareness even in confinement. "Ambrosio withdraws into the monastery to gain abstract knowledge and to mortify the flesh."
VOLKER, Klaus. "Der Mönch," Neue Rundschau 82 (1971): 774-779.
Deals with the first German translation of The Monk by von Oertel.
WATKINS, Daniel P. "Social Hierarchy in Matthew Lewis's The Monk," Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 115-124.
The Monk is best read as a reflector of social history during an age of violent and tumultuous change. The novel's presentation of social hierarchy "projects symbolically the conditions under which the cultural shift from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century was produced."
V. Doctoral Dissertations Exclusively on The Monk
GALL, John. "Lewis's 'Monk': A Formal Inquisition," Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 3602A (Duquesne University).
Applies formalist theories to The Monk to expose its "retardation devices," "the mystery text," and the process of Lewis's conversion of fable into Gothic novel by employing parody and literary self-consciousness.
SWOYER, Ardeth G. "Matthew Gregory Lewis and His Contributions to the Gothic Novel," Doctoral Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1944.
A study of The Monk as a unique and more violent variety of supernatural Gothic fiction. Although the general context is fantastic, Lewis contributed to the psychological realism of the Gothic novel.
VI. Doctoral Dissertations Containing Chapters or Sections on The Monk
ANDRIANO, Joseph D. "Our Ladies of Darkness: Junglan Readings of the Female Daimon in Gothic Fiction," Dissertation Abstracts International 47 (1986): 2150A (Washington State University).
A Jungian interpretation that includes The Monk's Matilda together with female demons in the work of Hoffmann, Poe, Irving, and Gautier. The Matilda figure "dramatizes the archetypal conflict between the instinctual, subliminal drive toward androgynous fusion."
BAYLISS, Linda Sue Singer. "Mirrors: Literary Reflections as Psychic Process," Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1985): 416A (Michigan State University).
Demonstrates how the mirror effect in The Monk and other romantic works "is inherent in diverse areas of the text. Like Gothic portraits that come to life, the texts even intrude uncomfortably into the detached security of their readers."
BHALLA, Alok. "Shades of the Preternatural: Thematic and Structural Essays on the Gothic Novel," Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1978): 2948A-2949A (Keni State University).
Reads Gothic fiction as nonfantastic, politically relevant, and "grounded in concretely defined social and material conditions." Like other Gothics of its period, The Monk "offers a cruel discourse on the coercive political, economic, and sexual arrangements of the age."
BOWEN, Kevin J. "The Gothic Novel in England: Studies in a Literary Mode." Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991): 166A (SUNY-Buffalo).
Reaction to the brutality and extremity of The Monk "proved often to be a barometer of fears of domestic unrest."
BOWMAN, Barbara. "The Gothic Novel: A Structuralist Inquiry," Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1 978): 4175A (University of Maryland).
In The Monk and other Gothics, 'Ihe structure of events challenges the central character as a dream challenges a dreamer."
BOYER, Gayle Ormond. "The Horrors of Romance: Figuring the Feminine in Early Gothic Fiction," Dissertation Abstracts International, 56:8 (1996): 3134A (Brown University).
Chapter 3 is devoted to Lewis. Discusses the interweaving of horror and romance and shows how "the anxiety at the center of both narratives disrupts the traditional critical dichotomy betweeen 'masculine' and 'feminine' Gothic."
CARSON, James P. "Crime and Conscience in the Gothic Novel," Dissertation Abstracts International 48 (1987): 1208A (University of California at Berkeley).
Devotes a full chapter to The Monk, "Gothic Properties: Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Journal of a West Indian Proprietor." These works suggest "a split in narrative voice as well as conceptual and configurative oppositions," such as the opposition between crime and conscience.
CHEN, Kuo jung. "The Gothic Narrative Structure: A Generic Reading of Four English Gothic Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Frankenstein,Melmoth the Wanderer," Dissertation Abstracts International, 55 (1994): 970A (University of Wisconsin).
Applies Todorov's theories of the fantastic to The Monk and several other Gothic novels to redefine the Gothic according to its semantic, spatial, syntactic, temporal, and verbal aspects.
COLEMAN, William E. "On the Discrimination of Gothicisms," Dissertation Abstracts International 31 (1970): 2871A (City University of New York).
Gothic fiction in general and The Monk in particular helped to expand "the parameters of character development" in the novel.
CONGER, Syndy Mc Millen. "Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels," Dissertation Abstracts International 37 (1977): 7733A (University of Iowa).
Challenges the usual view that the German Sturm und Drang movement deeply influenced the horror novels of Lewis and Maturin. These Gothic writers were influenced by Germanic materials, but the degree of influence on The Monk has been overstated.
DUHIG, Susan Caroline. "Romantic Pleasure, Gothic Pain, and Enlightenment Subjectivity," Dissertation Abstracts International, 54 (1994): 4448A-4449A (Cornell University).
Compares The Monk with Sade's Justine "to elucidate the ways in which the eroticism and irrationality of the English Gothic are caught up in an historical tendency to mechanize and rationalize pleasure."
EHLERS, Leigh Ann. "From Polarity to Perspective: The Development of Structure and Character in Gothic Fiction," Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1978): 294A (University of Florida).
The Monk must be seen as much more than escapist entertainment since it registers strong literary change at the close of the eighteenth century. "It retains only in part the providential pattern and attempts greater internalization of character psychology."
ENGLISH, Sarah Warder, "The Hunger of the Imagination: A Study of the Prose Style of Four Gothic Novels," Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1979): 6773A-6774A (University of North Carolina).
A stylistic analysis of the vocabulary, sentence structure, and rhetorical devices in The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolph, The Castle of Otrant o, and The Old English Baron. "Lewis returns to the style of Walpole, showing the same love for heightened bombastic language using exclamations, repetitions, superlatives, intensifiers, extravagantly stylized gestures, and sexual language."
FRANK, Frederick Stilson. "Perverse Pilgrimage: The Role of the Gothic in the Works of Charles Brockdan Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne," Dissertation Abstracts 29 (1968): 1866A-1867A (Rutgers University).
Devotes a section of one chapter to The Monk, "The Sick Muse; Six English Gothic Novels." Emphasizes the psychological success of Lewis in depicting the destruction of a Gothic hero from within in the psychomachic struggle, "a contest for superiority between his real and acquired character."
GOULD, Ellen Yvette. "The Gothic Novel: An Exercise in Definition," Dissertation Abstracts lntemational 38 (1 977): 3514A (SUNY at Buffalo).
In Gothic novels such as The Monk, "the old codes, the old ontology, are no longer viable and there is no new viable code so one is left with two equally unacceptable alternatives—a moribund ontology or chaos."
GROVE, Allen Whitlock. "Coming Out of the Castle: Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Gothic Fiction," Dissertation Abstracts International, 57 (1996): 2491A (University of Pennsylvania).
Chapter One, "This Genre Which is not One," on The Monk and Francis Lathom's Midnight Bell demonstrates "how the application of contemporary gender and sex binaries to novels ahistorically reifies the very social constructs that the genre challenges and destabilizes."
HAGEDORN, Jutta Angelika. "Der Gothische roman als sozialer roman des spätens achtzehnten jahrhunderts: Eine Vergleichende studie englischer und deutscher und sozialer romane," Dissertation Abstracts lntemational 48 (1988): 2057A (University of Georgia). ["The Gothic Novel as Social Novel of the Late Eighteenth Century: A Comparative Study of English and German Gothic and Social Novels"]
Argues that the Gothic novel should be redefined "as a type of social novel, not as merely trivial, horrifying, and fantastic narrative." Although The Monk "hides its social attack behind the medieval facade" it is still a social novel in many respects.
HENDERSHOT, Cyndy Kay. "Masculinity and the Gothic," Dissertation Abstracts International, 56:12 (1996): 4760A-4761A (Texas Tech University).
Chapter 1 discusses The Monk, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dracula, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. "The Gothic works to contaminate realism by introducing an unassimilable force."
HOUSTON, JoAnn. "Finding Meaning: A Discussion of Pornography and Eroticism in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Some Parallels between Matthew G. Lewis' The Monk," Dissertation Abstracts International 47 (1986): 188A (Florida State University).
Argues that both The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Fanny Hill and The Monk are conceived and structured in the didactic mode and are not pornographic.
HOWELLS, Coral Ann. "The Presentation of Emotion in the English Gothic Novels of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, with Particular Reference to Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew G. Lewis' Monk, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Works by the Minor Minerva Press Novelists Regina Maria Roche and Mary Anne Radcliffe," Doctoral dissertation, London University, 1969.
The Monk is a subversive text dealing in "Gothic neurosis." See also: Howells, Coral Ann, "M. G. Lewis, The Monk," Love, Mystery, and Misery. Feeling in Gothic Fiction.
HUDSON, Randolph Hoyt. "Hence Vain Deluding Joys: The Anatomy of Eighteenth-Century Gothicism," Dissertation Abstracts 22 (1962): 4344 (Stanford University).
The Monk and Mrs. Radcliffe's novels are intentionally antipastoral. These Gothics reacted to eighteenth-century pastoral by substituting "the cliches used in accounts of anti-pastoral urban and religious life, and amalgamated them all into the huge debate between pastoral good and Gothic evil."
JACQUETTE, Arlene. "'Vile Pruriency for Fresh Adventures': Sexuality and Storytelling in Selected Eighteenth-Century and Gothic Novels," Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1977): 783A (Vanderbilt University).
Compares ideas of distorted sexuality in various realistic and Gothic authors. The themes include "rape, seduction, repression, impotence, and sadism in Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, The Monk, and Melmoth the Wanderer to demonstrate the shared mimetic and aesthetic concerns of realistic and Gothic fictions."
KEELING, Thomas H. "The Grotesque Vision: Structure and Aesthetics in the British Gothic Novel," Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1977): 2809A (University of California at Los Angeles).
Analyzes Gothic fiction in terms of the theories of Todorov and Wolfgang Kayser on the grotesque. Grotesque visions center on demonic possession.
LEWIS, Paul. "Fearful Questions, Fearful Answers: The Intellectual Functions of Gothic Fiction," Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1977): 2791A-2792A (University of New Hampshire).
Examines eleven English and American Gothic novels, including The Monk, to refute the view that Gothic fiction is "intellectually shallow." Like many other examples of the Gothic, The Monk can and should be read as a novel of ideas.
MADOFF, Mark S. "Ambivalent and Nostalgic Attitudes in Selected Gothic Novels," Dissertation Abstracts Intemational 38 (1977): 284A-285A (University of British Columbia).
At their deepest levels, Gothic romances such as The Monk deal with "psychologically threatening problems of identity, knowledge, and education with its figure of the criminal or outcast, who is usually a sexual aggressor, indirectly representing anxieties."
MARTIN, Rebecca Ellen. "The Spectacle of Suffering: Repetition and Closure in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel," Dissertation Abstracts International, 57:8 (1997): 3509A (City University of New York).
Using a Freuding/Lacanian perspective, the study focuses on the readers engagement with spectacle in the the Gothic works of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Mary-Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Charles Robert Maturin.
MC ALLISTER, Harold S. "Apology for Bad Dreams: A Study of Characterization and the Use of Fantasy in Clarissa, Justine, and The Monk," Dissertation Abstracts International 32 (1972): 6383A (University of New Mexico).
Psychoanalytic interpretations of the sadomasochistic dream lives of various characters, including Lewis's Ambrosio. Ambrosio's lecherous fantasy of the Madonna reveals unfulfilled drives.
O'BRIEN, Kathleen Paula. "Chinks in the Armor: Romantic, Gothic, and Gothic Romantic Imagination," Dissertation Abstracts International, 57:7 (1997): 3039A (University of Oregon).
Gothic novels such as The Monk refute the Romantic poets' value of imagination. The novels of Lewis and Mary Shelley "illustrate the imagination's failure to transcend the limits of the material world or foster empathy."
O'DEA, Gregory Sean. "The Temporal Sublime: Time and History in the British Gothic Novel," Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1992): 2563A (University of North Carolina).
Chapter four investigates the Gothic's use of the supernatural "as a means of raising profound questions about the relationship between mortality and immortality mainly by way of Matthew Lewis's The Monk."
PEAVOY, John R. "Artificial Terrors and Real Horrors: The Supernatural in GothicFiction," Dissertation Abstracts Internatlonal 42 (1981): 714A-715A (Brandels University).
Describes the various roles allotted to the supernatural in Gothic fiction. Groups The Monk with those Gothics "where the supernatural is on the side of the evil characters. In The Monk, evil is real because the supernatural is real."
PLATZNER, Robert L. "The Metaphysical Novel in England: The Romantic Phase," Dissertation Abstracts International 33 (1973): 2390A (University of Rochester).
Classifies The Monk along with The Mysteries of Udolpho and Melmoth the Wanderer as specimens of the metaphysical novel. The Gothic romance represents an aesthetic revolt against the traditions of mimesis and humanism.
PRICE, Frederick W. "The Concept of Character in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Romance," Dissertation Abstracts International 32 (1972): 6388A-6389A (Princeton University).
Considers character development in various Gothics of the period. As the genre matured, it came to rely on "the idealized and highly conventional nature of characterization" to achieve its success.
RAY, Rhonda. "The Last Things; Apocalypse and Eschatology in British Dark Romanticism," Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 2068A (Emory University).
Examines themes of apocalypse and eschatology in The Monk and other Gothic works. In The Monk, "little hope exists for the fulfillment of the Romantic desire for union of human consciousness with the absolute consciousness."
REED, Ronald L. "The Function of Folklore in Selected English Gothic Novels," Dissertation Abstracts lntemational 33 (1972): 284A (Texas Technological University).
Analyzes the folklore elements in The Monk, The Castle of Otranto, and Melmoth the Wanderer to test the thesis that the Gothic novelists "used superstition from the folklore of England and Europe as a device for evoking terror in their readers."
REILLY, Donald T. "The Interplay of Natural and Unnatural: A Definition of Gothic Romance," Dissertation Abstracts International 31 (1970): 2353A (University of Pittsburgh).
Drawing examples from Lewis, Walpole, Beckford, Mary Shelley and other Gothics, argues that "the Gothic novels appeal lies in the reader's admiration for an absolute selflessness and benevolence that can never fully be realized by moral beings combined with varying degrees of departure from that norm."
RENO, Robert Princeton. "The Gothic Visions of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis," Dissertation Abstracts International 37 (1977): 7767A (Michigan State University).
A comparative study that seeks "to establish the precise nature of the intellectual exchange which emerges from The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and their relationship to The Monk." Mrs. Radcliffe counters Lewis's pessimism by refusing "to relinquish her essential optimism."
SLOAN, De Villo. "Influences of Industrialization on the Origins and Development of American Gothic Fiction," Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1982): 1548A (SUNY-Buffalo).
The first sections study the origins of Gothicism in Walpole and Lewis, "two masters of popular culture whose works dramatically departed from the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century."
TRACY, Ann Blaisdell. "Patterns of Fear in the Gothic Novel, 1790-1830," Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1977): 3460A (University of Toronto).
Interprets the Gothic novel as a mythic version of the story of the Fall. "The Gothic world is identified with the fallen world as evidenced by such characteristics as alienation, wandering, ruins, death and putrefaction, darkness, fear and guilt, impairment of the senses, corruption of the appetites, and repetitive temptation."
VAN LUCHENE, Robert S. "Essays in Gothic Fiction: From Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley," Dissertation Abstracts International 34 (1974): 422OA-4221A (Notre Dame University).
Has chapters on The Monk, The Castle of Otranto, The Old English Baron, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Frankenstein. Argues that the Gothic genre constantly redefined itself as it developed.
WENDELL, John R. "E.T.A. Hoffmann's Die Elixiere des Teufels and Its Dependence on Matthew G. Lewis' Monk." Dissertation Abstracts 28 (1967): 699A (University of Connecticut).
Demonstrates that E.T.A. Hoffmann "was influenced by Lewis to a much greater degree than has heretofore been acknowledged. Hoffmann goes beyond Lewis in displaying the deep psychological and metaphysical aspects" of the demonic or double life.
ZIRKER, Joan Mc Tigue. "The Gothic Tradition in English Fiction 1764-1824," Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1974): 422A (University of Indiana).
Opposes the negative view that Gothic fiction is merely "a meretricious and inflammatory appeal to a degenerate popular taste." The Monk and other novels of its type have disturbing connections with the real world and everyday life.
VII. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Editions of The Monk (Selected)
THE MONK, A Romance. London: J. Bell, 1796.
The first English edition.
THE MONK: A Romance in Two Volumes. Dublin: P. Wogan, P. Byrne, W. Jones, G. Folingsby, 1796.
The first Irish edition.
LE MOINE, trans. Deschamps, L. B. D. Després, Benoist, and De Lamare. Paris: Maridan, 1797.
The first French translation.
DER MÖNCH. Aus dem Englischen von Friedrich von Oertal. Leipzig: J. G. Beygang, 1797.
The first German translation.
AMBROSIO, or The Monk: A Romance, with Considerable Additions and alterations. London: J. Bell, 1798.
An edition expurgated and toned down by Lewis himself.
AMBROSIO, or The Monk. Boston: Etheridge for Thomas and Andrews, 1799.
The first American edition.
EL FRAILE, o Historica del Padre Ambrosio y de la belia Antonia. no publisher, 1822.
A Spanish translation.
VIII. Twentieth-Century Editions of The Monk
ANDERSON, Howard, ed. "Introduction," The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. vii-xix.
Has a selected bibliography, textual notes, and a chronology of Lewis's life. Stresses the power of the Gothic to appall the reader because of "Ihe way in which places of safety are transformed into places of danger and assumptions about human nature are forced to give way before a recognition of the power of the irrational."
ARTAUD, Antonin, trans. Le Moine. Paris: Denoël and Steele, 1931.
BAKER, Ernest, ed. "Introduction," The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis. New York: Dutton, 1906.
Included in "The Library of Early Novelists" series. Republished by Routledge, 1929.
DE WAILLY, Leon, trans. Le Moine, entièrement conforms au texts de la prèmiere edition originals. Paris: S. Corti, 1958.
French translation based on the text of the first edition of 1796.
FOUR Gothic Novels; The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, Vathek by William Beckford, the Monk by Matthew Lewis, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. GRIGORESCU, Dan, ed. Calugarul: Roman, trans. Bianca Zamfirescu. Bucharest, Romania: Minerva, 1987.
An edition of The Monk in Romanian.
JOHNSON, Liana M. Il Monaco: Romanzo di M.G. Lewis, prefazione di Leslie Fiedler. Milano: Longanesi, 1963. THE MONK, etchings by P. C. Armour. London: Gibbings, 1913. THE MONK. London: Brentano's, 1913. THE MONK [Der Mönch]. Anonyme Übersetzung aus dem Jahre 1799. Düsseldorf, West Germany: K. Rauch, 1962. PECK, Louis, ed. The Monk. Original Text—Variant Readings and A Note on the Text, Intro. John Berryman. New York: Grove Press, 1952.
Offers an unexpurgated text of the novel with reliable notes. Berryman ranks The Monk as "one of the authentic prodigies of English fiction, a book in spite of various crudenesses so good that even after a century and a half it is possible to consider it unhistorically."
POLOKOVICS, Friedrik, trans. Der Mönch. Frankfurt am Main: no publisher, 1986. SINKO, Zofia, trans. Mnich; Powiesc. Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy Imienia Ossolinskich, 1964. STALHAM, Francis Reginald, ed. The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis. London: Gibbings, 1906. VARMA, Devendra P., ed. "Introduction," The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, wood engravings by George Tute. London: Folio Society, 1984, pp. vii-xvi.
Evaluates the enduring success of The Monk, attributing its influence and popularity to "its subtle mixture of sex and violence seen in the context of the diffuse philosophy of extreme individualism, a characteristic common to the works of William Beckford and the Marquis de Sade."
IX. Chapbooks, Shilling Shocker Condensations, and Plagiarized Abridgements (Selected)
ALMAGRO and Claude; or, Monastic Murder Exemplified in the Dreadful Doom of an Unfortunate Nun. London: Dean and Munday, 1803.
A 44-page shilling shocker based on sensational episodes in The Monk. Almagro and Claude are Don Raymond and Agnes.
THE CASTLE of Lyndenberg,, or, The History of Raymond and Agnes, with the Story of the Bleeding Nun: And the Method by Which the Wandering Jew Quieted the Nun's Troubled Spirit. London: S. Fisher, 1798.
Gothic chapbook that omits most of the original plot to focus on one episode, the bleeding nun at Don Raymond's bedside.
DON SANCHO, or, the Monk of Hennares, A Spanish Romance. London: D. N. Shury for J. F Hughes, 1803.
A Gothic blue book with material pilfered from The Monk and other Gothic novels. Father Juan, the Monk of Hennares, is Ambrosio plus other Gothic villains of the period.
FATHER Innocent, Abbot of Capuchins; or, The Crimes of the Cloisters. Marvellous Magazine and Compendium of Prodigies 2 (April 1803): 316-356.
The periodical Gothic tale is an outright plagiarism of The Monk's triple plot. Father Innocent is conveyed from false sanctity to true damnation in forty pages.
THE MONK, A Romance: In Which Is Depicted the Wonderful Adventures of Ambrosio, Friar of the Order of Capuchins, Who Was Diverted from the Track of Virtue by the Artifices of a Female Demon. London: W.Mason, 1820.
Late chapbook version with the horror scenes intended to point up the moral stated in the title.
THE MONK of the Grotto; or, Eugenio and Virginia. London: Minerva Press for William Lane, 1800.
Translation of a French romance by Charles Antoine Pigault-Lebrun. To enliven the sentimentality, the translator added horror elements taken from the plot of The Monk.
RAYMOND and Agnes; or, The Bleeding Nun of Lindenberg. An Interesting Melodrama in Two Acts. Written by Henry William Grosette. Norwich: Bacon, Kinnebrook, 1797.
A dramatic adaptation of the Don Raymond-Agnes story accompanied by spectral sensationalism.
THE SECRET Oath; or Blood-Stained Dagger. London: Hurst, 1802.
A seventy-two page monastic shocker with supernatural and sanguinary elements plundered from The Monk.
X. Early Reviews of The Monk
ANALYTICAL Review 24 (October 1796): 403-404.
Objects to the muddled structure of the novel but not to its Gothic content. Lewis deserves praise "for not attempting to account for supernatural appearances in a natural way."
BRITISH Critic 7 (June 1796): 677.
A short notice that reads: "Lust, murder, incest, and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature, brought together, without the apology of probability."
CRITICAL Review 19 (February 1797): 194-200.
This often-cited review is attributed to Coleridge. Censures the vulgar sexual sensationalism of the plot and the coarse blasphemy but still judges the book to be "the offspring of no common genius; situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived."
EUROPEAN Magazine 31 (February 1797):111-115.
Finds nothing worth praising in the novel except for a few of the ballads. The Monk has "neither originality, morals, nor probability to recommend it."
MONTHLY Mirror 2 (June 1796): 98.
Highly favorable review that praises Lewis for a novel that is "very skilfully managed, and reflects the highest credit on the judgment and imagination of the writer."
MONTHLY Mirror 2 (1796): 323-328.
Gives a biographical sketch of Lewis and states that the novel was written for diversion during his travels.
MONTHLY Mirror 5 (1798): 157-158.
A review of the fourth edition. Now that Lewis has altered or omitted the "objectionable passages," The Monk is now "deserving of the very extraordinary favour it has received from the public.'
MONTHLYReview 23 (1797): 451.
A short, severe notice that declares The Monk to be an immoral book. The work is "totally unfit for general circulation. A vein of obscenity pervades the whole."
XI. Related Studies and Lewis's Other Writings
ALLEN, Virginia M. "Romantic Ballad and Gothic Plot," The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1983, pp.39-41.
With his Matilda character, Lewis contributed to the "gestation of the femme fatale."
BEATTIE, W. "'Tales of Terror,'" Times Literary Supplement, January 14,1939, P. 26.
A letter from the secretary of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Association. In Tales of Terror, "not two but three of the nine ballads were by Scott." "The Erl King," first ballad in the collection, is wrongly attributed to Lewis.
BERNSTEIN, Stephen D. "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel," Essays in Literature 18 (1991): 151-165.
Considers The Monk along with The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Melmoth the Wanderer, and other Gothics. Throughout its development, the Gothic novel retained its ideological content as accompaniment to horror and shock.
BISHOP, Morchard. "A Terrible Tangle," Times Literary Supplement, October 19, 1967, p. 989.
Conjectures that Lewis himself might possibly be the author of some of the contents of Tales of Terror. "These tales of terror were a corporate effort done by able men not wholly ill-disposed toward Lewis."
BYRD, Max. "The Madhouse, the Whorehouse, and the Convent," Partisan Review 44 (1977): 268-278.
Discusses the enclosures that the Gothic novelists found to be so symbolically useful. In the case of The Monk, the dungeon and monastery indicate "the disastrous consequences of incarceration when it is understood as isolation from society."
COOK, Davidson. "Robert Burns Did Not Write 'The Hermit,'" Bookman 85 (1934): 402-403.
Argues the case for Lewis's original authorship of the poem, "An Inscription in an Hermitage," which appears in the second edition of The Monk (1796).
COX, Jeffrey N., ed. Seven Gothic Melodramas, 1789-1825. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992, pp. 1-77.
The collection contains Matthew G. Lewis's The Captive; A Monodrama or Tragic Scene (1803).
EMERSON, Oliver Farrar. " 'Monk' Lewis and The Tales of Terror," Modern Language Notes 38 (1923): 154-159.
A learned investigation that deciphers the publication history and correct authorship of Tales of Terror, a work often confused with Lewis's Tales of Wonder.
FAVRET, Mary A. "Telling Tales About Genre: Poetry in the Romantic Novel," Studies in the Novel, 26 (1994): 281-300.
Contains incidental comments on the textual poems in The Monk. Lewis's publisher "deemed it worthwhile to place a list of the original poems in The Monk as the main feature of the book's first advertisement."
FISKE, Christabel F "The Tales of Terror," Conservative Review, March 1900, pp. 37-74.
A short history of the Gothic novel that dismisses The Monk as "one of the worst books in the English language."
GORDON, Jan B. "Narrative Enclosure as Textual Ruin: An Archeology of Gothic Consciousness," Dickens Studies Annual 11 (1983): 209-238.
Includes The Monk in its analysis of fragmented texts.
GRAHAM, John. "Character and Description in the Romantic Novel," Studies in Romanticism 5 (1966): 208-218.
Concentrates on the expression of psychology through physiognomy, The face of Ambrosio shows that "his evil character has expressions and experiences which are so intense that they brand his face."
GUTHKE, Karl S. "Some Notes on the Significance of the Weimar Court Stage in Anglo-German Literary Relations," Huntington Library Quarterly 20 (1957): 281-283.
On possible sources for Lewis's The Twins (1799). While in Weimar, Lewis saw Friedrich Schröder's Die Zwillingsbrüder, a comedy based on Jean François Regnard's verse comedy Les Menechmes; ou, Les Jumeaux (1705).
GUTHKE, Karl S. "M. G. Lewis' The Twins," Huntington Library Quarterly 25 (1962): 189-223.
Presents the text of the comedy The Twins; or, Is It He, or His Brother? Lewis's version of The Comedy of Errors.
GUTHKE, Karl S. "F L. Schröeder, J. F Regnard, and M. G. Lewis," Huntington Library Quarterly 27 (1963): 79-82.
Compares The Twins with a newly discovered play by F L. Schröeder, Die Zwillingsbrüder, probably seen by Lewis during his Weimar sojourn of 1792-93.
HAGGERTY, George E. "Fact and Fantasy in the Gothic Novel," Nineteenth Century Fiction 39 (1985): 379-391.
In Lewis's Monk and other Gothic novels, "there are very definite signs of how ultimately subjective and objective worlds can be made formally complementary."
HELLER, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1987, pp. 202.
Contains a single reference to The Monk in the conclusion. "The Monk shows characters living an alternate forbidden life."
HOGLE, Jerrold E. "The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel," Arizona Quarterly 36 (1980): 330-358.
Examines the role of the crypt in The Monk and other Gothic novels. Sees the crypt as "a controlling and subversive element."
HOLLAND, Norman N. and Leona F. SHERMAN. "Gothic Possibilities," New Literary History 8 (1977): 278-294.
Gothic fiction's projection of sexual images created possibilities for the genre. In this area, The Monk was a standard-setting text.
HUME, Robert D. "Gothic Versus Romantic," Publications of the Modern Language Association 84 (1969): 282-290.
Stresses the "concern for interior mental processes" throughout the history of the genre. Examples of the high horror-Gothic such as The Monk "have psychological consistency even within repulsive situations."
INVERSO, Mary Beth. "Gothic Narration and Gothic Melodrama: Some Crucial Distinctions," The Gothic impulse in Contemporary Drama. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989, pp. 8-10.
Lewis's play, Raymond and Agnes, acted in 1797, is "supernaturalized melodrama" based on an episode in The Monk.
JOHNSON, Edgar. Sir Waiter Scott. The Great Unknown. New York: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 158-160; 164-165.
Discusses the Scott-Lewis friendship and their letter exchanges after Scott met the author of The Monk in the spring of 1796. Lewis had become "an indulged darling in the most glittering circles of Mayfair" and assisted in the publication of Scott's translation of Goetz of Berlichingen.
KAMIO, Mitsuo. Tasha no tojo—Igirisu Gothic shosetsu no shuhen. Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 1994. [The Advent of others: A Study of English Gothic novels]
Item not seen.
KAUFMAN, Pamela. "Burke, Freud, and the Gothic," Studies in Burke and His Time 13 (1972): 2178-2192.
Views the Gothic as a sadomasochistic mode. Novels such as The Monk "have a preoccupation with survival. In Freudian terms, Gothic fantasy is counter-phobic; it embraces the very terror that it fears."
KILLEN, Alice M. Le Roman terrifiant ou roman noir de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe et son influence sur la littérature française jusquen 1840. Paris: G. Crés, 1915. [The Novel of Terror or Gothic Novel from Walpole to Ann Radcliffe and Its Influence on French Literature up to 1840]
A critical history of the genre that places The Monk in a key role in the rise of the French Gothic novel or roman noir.
KLEIN, Jürgen. Der Gotische roman und die äesthetik des bösen. Darmstadt, West Germany: Wissenschaftliche, 1975. [The Gothic Novel and the Aesthetic of Evil]
The Gothic aesthetic links unspeakable horror with beauty, delight, and sublimity and the attractions of evil. The Monk offers early examples of this aesthetic phenomenon.
LE TELLIER, Robert I. An Intensifying Vision of Evil: The Gothic Novel (1764-1820) as a Self-Contained Literary Cycle. Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanstik, Universität Salzburg, 1980.
Regards the Gothic as "an underestimated genre" whose effect on literary tradition has not been adequately recognized. The Monk is among those Gothic books that cannot, and should not, be ignored in the modern spirit.
LEWIS, Paul. "Fearful Lessons: The Didacticism of the Early Gothic Novel," College Language Association Journal 23 (1980): 470-484.
The novels of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were designed to be instructive as well as terrifying and horrifying. "The founders of the movement in Britain and America insisted on the compatibility of intensity, mystery, and didacticism."
LÜSEBRINK, Hans-Jürgen. "La Bastille: Château gothique," Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 659 (1984): 104-112. ['The Bastille: Gothic Castle"]
The political horrors associated with the Bastille are reflected in the prisons, dungeons, and castle crypts of The Monk, Godwin's Caleb Williams, and Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian. These Gothics reflect "le retour du refoulé du mystérieux, du surnaturel, du satanique après un siècle de rationalisme." ["The return of repulsion of the mysterious, the supernatural, the satanic after a century of rationalism"]
MADOFF, Mark. "The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 337-350.
Notes the "chaotic subconscious forces" that motivate both the wicked and the virtuous characters in The Monk.
NEILL, S. Diana. "The Gothic Romances," A Short History of the English Novel. London: Jarrolds, 1951, pp. 162-175.
Thinks that writers such as Walpole and M. G. Lewis "brought novel-reading into disrepute."
NELSON, Lowry Jr. "Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel," Yale Review 52 (1963): 236- 257.
A short, critical survey of the masterworks of Gothic fiction, including The Monk. Sees the Gothic as a precursor of the psychological novel. "The Gothicists for all of their outlandish oddities were in effect among the most fruitful literary explorers of the psyche." The Monk "presented under the license of sensationalism significant and basic traits of human nature."
NOVAK, Maximillian E. "Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 13 (1979): 50-67.
Gothic novels such as The Monk are characterized by "a strange blend of fascination and disgust," one of the fundamental traits of the grotesque.
PAULSON, Ronald. "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution," ELH 48 (1981): 532-554.
In revolutionary terms, "The Monk is about the act of liberation," but it is a liberation that leads to excess. The novel is imbued with "the energy of revolution itself," making it possible to equate its misdirected sexual energy to misdirected revolutionary energy.
PECK, Louis F. "Southey and Tales of Wonder," Modern Language Notes 50 (1935): 513-514.
There was friction between Southey and Lewis. Lewis called the ballads by Southey in Tales of Wonder "a sort of imbroglio."
PECK, Louis F. "M. G. Lewis and the Larpent Catalogue," Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1942): 382-384.
The Larpent Catalogue of eighteenth-century drama assigns sixteen plays to Matthew Gregory Lewis.
PECK, Louis F. "Act III of Lewis's Venoni," Modern Language Notes 58 (1943): 265-268.
Because Act III of the Gothic melodrama based on Boutet de Monvel's Les Victimes cloîtrées failed in the production of 1 December 1808 at Drury Lane, Lewis rewrote Act III.
PECK, Louis F. "An Adaptation of Kleist's Die Familie Schroffenstein," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 44 (1945): 9-11.
Identifies the source for Lewis's Gothic tale, Mistrust; or, Blanche and Osbright, to be Kleist's five act tragedy of 1803, Die Familie Schroffenstein.
PECK, Louis F. "On the Date of the Tales of Wonder," English Language Notes 2 (1964): 25-27.
Cites a letter of 12 December 1800 in which John Wordsworth notes, "I have seen Mr. Lewis' Tales of Wonder." Peck determines 1800 to be the probable date of publication.
PECK, Louis F. "New Poems by Matthew G. Lewis," Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 203 (1967): 189-194.
Discusses a holograph copy of poems composed between 1804 and 1808 for Lady Holland. Maintains that "Lewis is entitled to more attention than he has received as a song writer. Coleridge admired his work in this genre."
POENICKE, Klaus. "'Schönheit im schosse des schreckens': Raumgefüge und menschenbild im anglischen schauerroman," Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 207 (1970): 1-19. ["'Beauty in the Womb of Terror': Spatial Structure and Human Representation in the English Gothic Novel"]
Analyzes the aesthetics of horror in various Gothic novels, including The Monk, to show how Gothic writers such as Lewis and Radcliffe create opportunities for deriving pleasure from the situating of beauty in the womb of terror.
PREU, James A. "The Tale of Terror," English Journal 47 (1958): 243-247.
Amateurish essay that sketches the history of the genre and comments briefly on each of the key novels. Ambrosio's temptation and fall are compared to getting olives out of the bottle. The first is difficult; the rest, an easy flow.
PUNTER, David. "1789: The Sex of Revolution," Criticism 24 (1982): 201-217.
A deconstructionist reading of the impact of revolutionary events in determining "the sexual shape of Romanticism" in The Monk and other works of the 1790s.
REDDIN, Chitra Pershed. Forms of Evil in the Gothic Novel. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Examines forms of evil in nine Gothic novels, including The Monk.
REED, Toni. "The Motif in British Fiction," Demon Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1988, pp. 54-92.
Mentions The Monk along with other Gothics that employ the demon lover motif. "The standard Gothic plot incorporates the underlying emotional core found in the 'demon lover'."
RENO, Robert P. "James Boaden's Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis' The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage," Eighteenth Century Life 9 (1984): 95-106.
Analyzes the role of specters in the two plays. In Lewis's Gothic drama, the ghostly presence "is crucial to the success of the play" and symbolizes "the universal dangers of overwrought desire and uncontrolled passion."
SADLEIR, Michael. "Tales of Terror," Times Literary Supplement, January 7, 1939, pp. 9-10.
Corrects an inaccuracy in Montague Summers's Gothic Quest on the Tales of Terror-Tales of Wonder confusion. Cites George B. Johnston's paper for the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society on the mixup.
SAFFARI, Kokab. Las Légendes et contes persans dans le littérature anglaise des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles jusqu'en en 1859. Paris: Presses du Palais-Royal, 1972, pp.127-130.
Notes briefly the influence of the story of Santon Barsisa as a source for The Monk.
SANDIFORD, Keith A. "'Monk' Lewis and the Slavery Sublime: The Agon of Romantic Desire in the Journal," Essays in Literature, 23 (1996): 84-98.
On Lewis's Journal of a West Indian Proprietor.
SCARBOROUGH, Dorothy. "The Gothic Romance," The Supernatural in Modem English Fiction (1917). New York: Octagon, 1967, pp. 6-53.
Discusses demonism and satanism in the novel and calls The Monk "that hall of Gothic horrors."
SCHWARZBACH, Frederic. "A New Theatrical Source for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities,"Notes & Queries 22 (January-February 1977): 18-20.
Identifies the source as Lewis's Gothic drama, The Castle Spectre.
SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Follows the transmission of conventions and devices from Walpole's Castle of Otranto through the early Gothic tradition to demonstrate the form's coherence. Although The Monk is thematically different from Radcliffean Gothic, the conventions are similar.
SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky. "The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel," Publications of the Modern Language Association 96 (1981): 255-270.
Examines the device and image of the veil in Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian and Lewis's Monk. "Beginning with a description of the sexual function of veils in these novels, the attributes of the veil, and of the surface generally, are contagious metonymically, by touch, and that a related thematic strain depicts veils, like flesh, as suffused or marked with blood."
SKILTON, David. "Gothic, Romantic, and Heroic," The English Novel. Defoe to the Victorians. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977, pp. 59-79.
Accounts for the place of the Gothic novel in the later development of the novel form. Books such as The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho paved the way for the romantic elements and characterization to be seen in Victorian fiction.
SPECTOR, Robert D. "Introduction," Seven Masterpieces of Gothic Horror. New York: Bantam Books, 1963, pp. 1-11.
"More than any other novel, The Monk characterizes the rebellion against authority" expressed by the Revolution and expressed excessively by the Reign of Terror. The anthology also contains Lewis's Mistrust; or, Blanche and Osbright, A Feudal Romance (pp. 237-330).
STEEVES, Harrison R. Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1965.
Considers The Monk an important and innovative novel by its "raising sexual violence to the level of tragic significance."
TWITCHELL, James B. "'I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night': Incest in Nineteenth Century Popular Culture," Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 156-157.
Refers to The Monk as "the most important of the sibling incest category." The book's sexually reckless hero reflects the "Sadean transformation of nineteenth century pornography-barbarism in the service of titillation."
VARMA, Devendra P. "Introduction." The Bravo of Venice: A Romance by Matthew Gregory Lewis. New York: Arno Press, 1972.
Discusses Lewis's 1805 tale in relation to the Räuberrroman or German robber romance as written by Schiller and Zschokke. Refers to Lewis as "the high priest of the intense school."
WATT, William W. Shilling Shockers of the Gothic School. A Study of the Chapbook Gothic Romances (1932). New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.
Comments on various plagiarized abridgements and chapbooks based on The Monk and its episodes. Lewis's Monk "proved profitable to the piratical publishers of the shilling shockers."
WEBER, lngeborg. "Gothic Villain and Byronic Hero," English Romanticism: The Paderborn Symposium, ed. Rolf Breuer, Werner Huber, Reiner Schöwerling. Essen, West Germany: Die Blaue Eue, 1985, pp. 85-116.
Traces the evolution of the Gothic hero-villain and the character's relationship to the Byronic hero. Relates the careers of Ambrosio and others to Byronic guilt, crime, and melancholy.
WISCHHUSEN, Stephen, ed. The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas. London: Gordon Fraser, 1975.
One of the six Gothic melodramas is Lewis's Castle Spectre.
WYPLEL, L. "Ein schauerroman als quells Die Anfrau? " Euphorion 7 (1903): 718-731. ["A Gothic Novel as the Source for The Ancestress?']
A source study of Grillparzer's fate tragedy Die Anfrau. The contribution of The Monk is discussed.
YOUNG, A. B. "Shelley and M. G. Lewis," Modern Language Review 1 (1906): 322-324.
Shelley's borrowings from Lewis should more properly be called plagiarism. Shelley's Zastrozzi, for example, "is nothing but a second version of The Monk with, however, great alterations."
ZIMANSKY, Curt R. "Shelley's Wandering Jew: Some Borrowings from Lewis and Radcliffe," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 18 (1978): 597-609.
Cites parallel passages to verify Shelley's extensive borrowing from The Monk in the writing of the four cantos of his poem Wandering Jew.
ZIMANSKY, Curt R. "Zastrozzi and The Bravo of Venice: Another Shelley Borrowing," Keats-Shelley Journal 30 (1981): 15-17.
A source study that presents parallel passages to establish that "Shelley's Venetian episodes in Zastrozzi (chapter XIV to the novel's conclusion) are based on the opening sentences of Matthew Gregory Lewis's novel The Bravo of Venice."