Introduction

pp. 1-10

in: Andrew R. Smith, Gothic radicalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

In many respects this study is a history of the ineffable. What is at issue is an exploration of a tradition of what I am going to refer to as idealist Gothic writing. My reading of a particular Gothic tradition which spans the nineteenth century is one which observes the mutations and developments in an idealist tradition of thought which has its roots in the eighteenth century and its terminus in the twentieth; in other words, the idealist tradition which extends from Burke's Philosophical Enquiry (1757) to Freud's The Uncanny" (1919). That such a tradition can be mapped is not controversial; Angela Leighton, for example, has identified a "progressive internalisation of the eye" which began in the eighteenth century.¹ In this internalisation outward modes of perception were replaced by a new emphasis on introspection, the roots of which are to be found in Burke, and its culmination in Freud's account of the unconscious.