Gothic Romanticism, 2nd Edition. Wordsworth, Architecture, Politics, Form (2022) offers a revisionist account of both Wordsworth and the politics of antiquarianism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a historically-driven study that develops a significant critique and revision of genre- and theory-based approaches to the Gothic, it covers many key works by Wordsworth and his fellow “Lake Poets” Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. The second edition incorporates new materials that develop the argument in new directions opened up by changes in the field over the last decade. The book also provides a sustained reflection upon Romantic conservatism, including the political thought and lasting influence of Edmund Burke. New material places the book in wider and longer context of the political and historical forms seen developing in Wordsworth, and proposes Gothic Romanticism as the alternative line of cultural development to Victorian Medievalism.
Review of the Second Edition (2022) In this important new edition of Gothic Romanticism, Tom Duggett explores the wide and challenging field of cultural Gothicism: architecture, politics, and form. His impressively detailed account of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic is wonderfully rich and rewarding, showing how it is actively social and political and integral to the advent of Romanticism. Duggett’s focus is on William Wordsworth – usually neglected in Gothic studies but here recast as the chief architect of this emergent culture. In fluent prose and with telling rigour, Duggett develops new ways of understanding Gothicism through an approach that is refreshingly historicist and culturally ambitious, encompassing the literary uses of architecture, national and international politics, and educational theory. What arises from this strikingly original analysis is a significant re-evaluation of Wordsworth and sophisticated new models of both Gothicism and Romanticism.” --Nick Groom, Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, Macao
Reviews of the First Edition (2010)
Tom Duggett’s Gothic Romanticism is a compellingly ambitious study of the pursuit of a purer and better gothic in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England. Focusing on Wordsworth and the Lake Poets’ attempt to refine a coarser, more sensational gothic as set forth in the novels of Radcliffe and Scott and in antiquarian curiosities, Duggett weaves sustained analysis of their poetry with thoughtful commentary on medieval architectural imagery and history, the turn to conservative politics, and educational reform. This multileveled investigation demonstrates in engaging prose the centrality of a cultivated rhetoric of a gothic aesthetic in this period while provocatively suggesting its relevance to a post-9/11 era where architecture “has assumed an importance that seemed without precedent.” Gothic Romanticism goes far in detailing such a poetic, cultural, and historical precedent. - MLA Citation for 2010 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars
"Tom Duggett's excellent Gothic Romanticism takes its cue from Wordsworth's Preface to The Excursion of 1814, in which he likened his poetic works to "gothic Church" ... With a fine eye for the cultural tributaries and confluences that inform this invisible edifice, Duggett's densely-woven but fluent prose illuminates the way in which poetic and political imagination fused in Wordsworth's aspirational emblem . . .[T]he book succeeds . . . not only as a study in cultural history, but as an education in the dynamic fusion of the poetic and the constitutional imagination - something so fundamental to the common law cultures of the world, and yet rarely valued as such. To articulate the many planes of Wordsworth's intricate activity in this sphere is a fine achievement." - Gregory Leadbetter in The Wordsworth Circle "[Gothic Romanticism] is a thoroughly researched, historically-driven study that takes disparate topics (architecture, politics, literature, and education, among others) and draws them together in a lucid style. Such an offering is a genuine contribution to the study of Wordsworth's career as well as to the intertwined cultural landscape of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." - Jeffrey C. Johnson in Romanticism
"Duggett achieves a subtle tracing of the complex and ambivalent trope of the Gothic as it appears, often in occluded form, in a number of Wordsworth's works. His handling of the political writing is exceptionally illuminating." - Tim Fulford, Professor of English, De Montfort University