Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0 521 77328 8 (hardback). Price: £35.00 (US$59.95).

With the many recent individual studies reconfiguring the relationship between Gothic and Romantic writers, a book length study on the subject seems long overdue, and Michael Gamer's fine study addresses this need while it reflects upon and organizes those reassessments. Older studies often narrated a Kunstlerroman in which a Romantic poet, for example Wordsworth or Shelley, dabbled with gothic tropes in his youthful writing but outgrew them as he embarked upon his mature career. Or those studies focused on how a Romantic writer, say Coleridge, might borrow from the literature of terror but transform and elevate its materials. Gamer rewrites these accounts through a carefully researched focus on "how romantic ideology constituted itself generically as a sustained response to the reception of gothic writing" (p. 200). Beginning with that long accepted paradox in the gothic's reception, its enormous popularity among readers set against its "monotonous," even "ritualistic abuse" by reviewers (p. 42), Gamer studies how romantic writing negotiates this "conflict between the demands of popular and critical audiences in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 23). One absolute strength of the book is Gamer's sharp-eyed attention to the material and personal contexts of these reviews and writers' responses to them. Another is his decision to chart the dispersal of the gothic among various literary forms: poetry (in a provocative re-visitation of Wordsworth's famous attacks on the gothic); drama (in a chapter on Baillie); and the novel (in a final chapter that fittingly shows Scott moving away from his early poetic and dramatic affiliations with Lewis to the more critical "packaging" of gothic materials in his novels). What issues from Romanticism and the Gothic is the clearest account we have yet of an often-told tale: the emergence of the gothic as a force in the literary and critical marketplace of 1764-1825. Gamer's allied argument, that romantic ideology constructs itself through its various engagements with the rise of and reception of the gothic, will surely spark debate and invite qualification, but such rethinking of terms underscores the value of his detailed study of the contentious relationship between the two literary movements. Gamer's focus on the threefold reception of the gothic (by writers, reviewers, and popular readers) enables him to deal with refreshing exactitude on a subject that has long occupied critics who define genre through convention or psychology: what was and is the gothic? For Gamer, the answer is simple—what those writers, reviewers, and readers considered to be gothic—and this strategy leads to his painstaking study of the gothic's receptions, formations, reformations, and deformations. These subjects have always proved murky and, thus, very productive grounds for gothic criticism, yet Gamer's command of the gothic's reception, both in its contemporary context and recent criticism, draws these clear conclusions from existing scholarship on the subject: 1) while a bit dicey in terms of gender and politics, the project initiated by Walpole and his followers began, through the rehabilitations of Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee and then mainly, of course, Ann Radcliffe a perilous, always qualified path toward official acceptance, with The Romance of the Forest (1791) "mark[ing] the high point of gothic's cultural prestige" (p. 71); 2) but the enormous success of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and its rash of low-brow imitations, followed by the alarming popularity of The Monk, marks a decisive turning point downward, as reviewers perceive a dangerous foreigness to the gothic which was really, in Gamer's neat perception, a defensive "urge to deport gothicism to Germany" (p. 78); 3) from this time forth, despite its continued popularity and remarkably varied figurations, begins the reviewers' remarkably unvaried …