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'Christabel' as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability

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From: Gothic Studies
Date: 20050501
Author:Hogle, Jerrold E

For all the attempts to answer it, the question persists: what does it mean that Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the popular 'Gothic' of the 1790s in his unfinished 'Christabel', composed between 1797 and 1800, when he so passionately condemns Gothic fiction as 'low', 'vulgar', and 'pernicious' in reviews and letters of that very time?1 To be sure, prompted in part by the popularity and translations of G. A. Burger's German-Gothic poem Lenore (first Anglicized in 1790), 'Christabel' strives mightily to situate its perceived cultural level above what was then termed 'the terrorist school of ...

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