The monk (1796): a hispanist's reading

Authors

  • Abigail Lee Six Royal Holloway, University of London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2012n62p25

Abstract

This article argues that the honour plays of seventeenth-centurySpain have been overlooked as precursors to the Gothic. ReadingLewis’s The Monk through this prism reveals that Spanishconcept of honour plays sheds light upon the characterization ofAmbrosio. Furthermore, the honour code gives rise to numerousareas of common ground with the Gothic, including the centralityof sexual secrets, imprisoned women, and a predilection forgore. Lewis’s opportunities for access to this Spanish corpus areconsidered and finally, it is posited that the post-eighteenthcenturyfigure of the Gothic villain who is troubled and complexmay be traceable, via The Monk, to the Spanish Golden Age.

Author Biography

Abigail Lee Six, Royal Holloway, University of London

Abigail Lee Six is Professor of Spanish at Royal Holloway, Universityof London. She has published on a wide range of Spanish writersdating from the nineteenth century to the present day, but mostrecently has been working to bring the usefulness of Gothic studiesto the attention of Hispanists and to demonstrate the relevance ofHispanic texts to Gothic scholars beyond the Pyrenees. This researchhas produced several articles and two monographs so far, one onthe fiction of the contemporary novelist Adelaida García Morales,Haunting Words (Boydell & Brewer, 2006) and the other, GothicTerrors (Bucknell University Press, 2010), on a selection of mainstreamwriters including Galdós, Pardo Bazán, Unamuno, and

Downloads

Published

2012-11-06

Issue

No. 62 (2012): Gothic: New Directions

Section

The Gothic in Europe

License

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.