Eighteenth-century Gothic writing encoded anxieties about revolution, Catholicism, property, and women’s power.

Evidence

The historical origins of Gothic writing in the eighteenth century are simultaneously political and aesthetic. Rising along with the English novel during the same decades that are the prelude to Romanticism, the Gothic in its narrative form engages issues of beauty, the character of the sublime and the grotesque, the political dynamics of British culture (especially with regard to the kind of social change that comes to be represented by the French revolution), the quality of being English (including the holding of anti-Catholic religious attitudes), the structure of the economy (especially concerning property in a market economy and gift-exchange), and the place of women in hierarchies of power. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 425

Categorization

• XREF: Reads as a survey analogy to Edward Said’s orientalism-as-domestic-projection thesis — the Gothic carries British domestic political anxieties that the Muslim monster would later absorb.