Traditionally, kings and rulers were featured on stamps and money; the titled and affluent commissioned busts and portraits; and criminals and missing persons appeared on wanted posters. British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, reworked ideas about portraiture to promote the value and agendas of the ordinary middle classes. According to Kamilla Elliott, our current practices of "picture identification" (driver's licenses, passports, and so on) are rooted in these late eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century debates. "Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction" examines ways writers such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and C. R. Maturin as well as artists, historians, politicians, and periodical authors dealt with changes in how social identities were understood and valued in British culture - specifically, who was represented by portraits and how they were represented as they vied for social power. Elliott investigates multiple aspects of picture identification: its politics, epistemologies, semiotics, and aesthetics, and the desires and phobias that it produces. Her extensive research not only covers Gothic literature's best-known and most studied texts but also engages with more than 100 Gothic works in total, expanding knowledge of first-wave Gothic fiction as well as opening new windows into familiar work.
Kamilla Elliott is senior lecturer at Lancaster University and is author of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note to the Reader Introduction 1. Theory and/of Picture Identification 2. The Politics of Picture Identification 3. "The Age of Portraiture" and the Portraiture of Politics 4. Matriarchal versus Patriarchal Picture Identification 5. Portraits, Progeny, Iconolatry, and Iconoclasm 6. Identifying Pictures 7. Pictures Identifying 8. Iconism and the Aesthetics of Gothic Fiction 9. Desiring Picture Identification 10. Fearing Picture Identification Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
An outstanding contribution to Gothic studies, to cultural/literary history in general, and to our grasp of the spread of the 'portrait' across many different media since the early modern period. -- Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
Elliott's project is extensive and well thought-out. Her book includes ten chapters, plus a helpful introduction and a forward-looking conclusion. The argument builds gradually and grows in complexity as it goes along... The project as a whole opens up an important conversation. -- Christopher Roovee Eighteenth Century Fiction
