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Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole's Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his \"Strawberry Committee\" of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites. Matthew M. Reeve argues that the new \"third sex\" of homoerotically inclined men and the new \"modern styles\" that they promoted—including the Gothic style and chinoiserie—were interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a \"queer architecture.\" Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies.

Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (1717-1797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole's Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his \"Strawberry Committee\" of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites. Matthew M. Reeve argues that the new \"third sex\" of homoerotically inclined men and the new \"modern styles\" that they promoted-including the Gothic style and chinoiserie-were interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a \"queer architecture.\" Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies.

This article uses the English Gothic’s eighteenth-century dismantling of male lineage and Enlightenment certainty in Horace Walpole’s The Castle Otranto as a lens for understanding the twenty-first-century commercial popularity of director Mike Flanagan’s Gothic films, particularly Doctor Sleep. Building on Stephen King’s 2013 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep establishes a new lineage of male writers who value how the Gothic traditions of irrational emotion and doubt can inspire new realms of knowledge to lessen psychological suffering caused by traumatic lineage. By “traumatic lineage” I mean the threat and violence some find necessary to maintain the patrilineal claim that it is “naturally” the only way to organize society. Like Walpole’s mythopoeic Gothic novel, Flanagan’s Gothic films demonstrate how patrilineal lineage damages other men, not just women; thus, Flanagan’s films offer psychological workbooks for practicing a type of reparative masculinity that involves exposure-exercises of cognitive behavior therapy (Doctor Sleep’s “boxing” intrusive, traumatic memories), male communities of care, and interdependent empathy. I support this argument by closely reading how Flanagan’s filmic tools of domestic metaphor, uncanny casting, and repurposed sets from Kubrick’s The Shining not only tell how to exorcise the inherited stills of the Overlook Hotel but also show viewers how to do so. We experience Dan Torrance’s reparative masculinity in real-time, communally sharing and recasting Dan’s horrific images of 40 years ago, but we now relate to them in psychologically helpful ways that enable community. In this way, I illustrate and encourage future study of how Gothic texts not only point to marginalized, repressed problems, but more importantly, how they help us relate differently to a traumatic past and innovate strategies for immediate relief from inherited suffering.

In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through Orphan Julie suffers to some extent the common Gothic mother’s fate, being abducted and held captive in a convent for a portion of the novel, she remains the focus of the other characters’ attention and ultimately is restored to preside over the deathbed confession of her errant husband. By showing how Julie’s immaculate motherhood reforms the patriarchal family, we suggest that Catholicism, however counter-intuitively, can be understood as a potentially “queer” element in modern British consciousness. By inspiring an alternative domesticity, Sleath’s maternal icon shows one way that the Gothic can provide a constructive alternative to modernity’s strictures.

During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole’s term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. Recovering the prehistory of the term suggests that “serendipity,” rather than being a name for a special mode of discovery invented by Walpole, has all along accompanied empiricism as the name for an essential gap in its epistemology. Serendipity bears directly on the “induction problem,” or what has more recently been called the “conceptual leap.” Though Walpole gave it its current name, versions of the concept have all along isolated a critical gap in the method of the sciences inaugurated by Bacon.

On Christmas Day 1717 the North Sea area was hit by the most deadly flood disaster in its entire history, which took the life of more than 10,000 people. Present-day concerns over climate change and the recurrence of extreme weather conditions might tempt historians to discuss floods like 1717 in terms of the overall vulnerability and resilience of societies or 'socio-environmental systems'. However, in medieval and early modern Europe it is hard to find examples of societies which did not prove resilient in the face of flooding: through absorption or adaptation, coastal society as a whole was perfectly able to overcome periodic episodes of flooding even when such episodes were sometimes perceived as real catastrophes. At the same time, however, coastal societies differed greatly in the number of people exposed to harm and suffering. Processes of political and economic marginalization, as well as unsustainable forms of land-use, turned some people into victims of flood disasters, while others escaped. Hence only by moving discussions of vulnerability and resilience from the level of societies to the level of people, can a better understanding of natural hazards and disasters in the past and at present be achieved.

This essay looks at the letters of Horace Walpole through the lens of the contemporary performance theory of José Muñoz in order to suggest the ways in which Walpole’s feelings in the past reach us with a hope for the future. By looking at touchstones in Horace Walpole’s life, I look for a model of queer relationality that is centuries ahead of its time.

In looking closely at Horace Walpole's Correspondence, George E. Haggerty shows how these letters, when taken in aggregate, offer an astonishingly vivid account of the vagaries of eighteenth-century masculinity. Walpole talks about himself obsessively: his wants, his needs, his desires; his physical and mental pain; his artistic appreciation and his critical responses. It is impossible to read these letters and not come away with a vivid impression of a complex personality from another age. Haggerty examines the ways in which Walpole presents himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman, and considers his personal relationships, his needs and aspirations, his emotionalism and his rationality—in short, his construction of himself—in order to see what it tells us about the age in general and more specifically, about masculinity in an era of social flux. This study of Walpole and his epistolary relations offers a unique window into both the history of masculinity in the eighteenth century and the codification of friendship as the preeminent value in western culture. Recent studies have tried to rewrite Walpole in a twenty-first century mold while this work looks at the writer and the ways in which he constructs himself and his relations, not in hopes of uncovering a lurid secret, but rather in pursuit of the figure that he created and that has fascinated generations of readers and writers since the eighteenth century.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) offers the reader fantastical versions of two seemingly realistic office technologies: shorthand writing and polyglot dictionaries. In both cases, Stoker’s changes allow the reader to see varieties of spoken language in ways that the real technologies would not have allowed. Representing dialect through shorthand, as Mina Harker does, would have been impossible with Pitman shorthand as well as antithetical to the principles behind that writing system. And no books existed that could have enabled the translations that Jonathan Harker claims to make with his polyglot dictionary. However, Stoker uses standard English spelling when representing characters of higher status, such as Van Helsing, Morris, and Dracula, all of whom represent national types that were routinely marked by dialect respelling in other fictions of Stoker’s time. The novel therefore exhibits two contrary tendencies: Stoker uses nonstandard spelling when he could easily have avoided it, and he avoids it when he could easily have used it. We place that contradiction in Victorian debates about spelling reform and language purity. We argue that the novel uses standard spelling to reinforce an alliance of Anglo-Teutonic elites, whereas the heteroglossia and polyglossia of these language technologies undermine that trajectory.

Aldrich reviews Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole's Collection at the Strawberry Hill, Twickenham England.