Multiculturalism, the foreign and early gothic novels

Abstract

Many literary historians nowadays stress the importance of cultural exchanges between England and the Continent in the process of the creation of Gothic fiction in the last decades of the eighteenth century (Hale in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 17-38, 2002; Cornwell in A new companion to the gothic. Willey, pp. 64-76, 2012; Wright in Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820. The Import of Terror. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003). Despite political tencsions between England and France at that time, “the import of terror,” as Wright has put it, was a two-way, fast-flowing literary traffic, which impacted on the shape of what is nowadays known as literary Gothic. French romances helped shape Gothic fiction, which was then translated into French and, with French being the lingua franca of the erudite elites, its radiation stretched from the Atlantic to the eastern reaches of the Continent. Polish intellectual elites read the early English Gothic novels in their French translations. In Poland, during the reign of the last king, Stanisław August, literary activity, translation included, was encouraged and supported by the monarch as part of the reformative educational scheme to improve the nation. This paper will attempt to look more closely at these multicultural and multilingual exchanges, with the aim of reading early Gothic fiction’s predilection for the foreign as a consequence of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Enlightenment, which fostered interest in foreign literatures, made possible by mushrooming translations.