The Monk is full of references to Lewis’s reading, and in fact is one of the first novels to offer the kind of inter-textuality that is so common today: again and again he refers to other authors and other writings, and frequently lifts scenes or passages and re-works them into his own context. (Occasionally these themes overlapped, with stories of bandits being haunted by the ghosts of their victims.) Crime fiction was also very popular in Germany, with many stories focusing upon marauding bandits, often presenting them as anti-heroes. During the late 18th century, the Germans were really the only people to be writing out-and-out horror stories, in contrast to the English habit of “explaining away” the supernatural. However, Lewis was equally a fan of the German literature of the time. He had earlier started (although never completed) a inspired by The Castle Of Otranto, and he was wildly enthusiastic about Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries Of Udolpho, published in 1795. Lewis was a voracious reader, and a great fan of the English Gothic novel. Most modern editions go back to the original text, however, and rightly so. Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble.”) Lewis seems to have been surprised and hurt by the intensity of the criticism, and he progressively edited the later editions of his novel to remove the more contentious material. (The most famous attack upon him was by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Critical Review: “The author is a man of rank and fortune. The Monk was a runaway best-seller, but it was also savagely attacked as obscene and blasphemous – not least because, at the time of his novel’s publication, Lewis was a Member of Parliament. Lewis set out to write the “ultimate” Gothic novel, and he certainly succeeded. The Monk was published when Matthew Lewis was only nineteen years old and is very much a young man’s enthusiastic and rather reckless work. So – all care taken, no responsibility accepted! Welcome, all! This time around I will be tutoring Madeline (Squeak圜hu) in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, from 1796.įor those of you who are planning on lurking, but who are not familiar with this novel, I feel that I should start by offering a general warning about its contents: this is a novel featuring sex and violence and horror, including several scenes that are fairly shocking and offensive even by modern standards.
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