The Monk: A Bicentenary Bibliography

Since its first publication in March 1796, The Monk has never ceased to attract and repel readers or to enthrall and infuriate critics. Even its first audience sensed that The Monk was a new strain of Gothic novel whose lurid horrors, strident supernaturalism, satanic pomp, and sexually explicit episodes were merely a facade for the deeper cultural and political fears of a dying age of reason. The Monk's first critics and reviewers, no doubt secretly excited by Lewis's violation of all artistic constraints, condemned the novel on grounds of immorality and salaciously bad taste but read The Monk enthusiastically and with clandestine enjoyment, as the famous Coleridge review of February 1797 clearly suggests. The book that would live in infamy was of no intellectual interest or value whatsoever to critics or literary historians throughout the nineteenth century, although The Monk maintained a large underground readership. Together with other ostracized works of Gothic fiction, The Monk 's notoriety and inspirational energy drew readers as diverse as Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Pushkin, and Anthony Trollope. In 1839, Lewis's first biographer, Mrs. Margaret Cornwall Baron-Wilson, provided the essential details of Lewis's life and writing that would later give rise to the serious study of The Monk in the twentieth century. From its underground status as forbidden book and decadent literary curio, The Monk would eventually gain critical prominence, if not regard, with scholars of romanticism, the psychological novel, cultural history, semiotics, and, more recently, Foucaultian analysis and feminist thought and theory. Today, stimulated by the renaissance in Gothic studies in general, interest in The Monk and the other Gothics of the 1790s has never been higher. The accompanying bicentenary bibliography verifies this interest and is intended to serve as a critical backdrop for the essays. By graphing shifts in critical taste and directing readers of The Monk to the prolific and expanding primary and secondary sources on the novel the bibliography confirms the values and pleasures of this key Gothic text. Designed to be consulted sequentially, the bibliography conducts a census of contemporary and historical criticism appearing in books, monographs, scholarly journals, and doctoral dissertations, with the eleven individual sections containing complete and compendious data except for Section VII, "Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Editions of The Monk " and Section IX, "Chapbooks, Shilling Shocker Condensations, and Plagiarized Abridgements of The Monk ," which are selectively compiled and annotated. The exact or even approximate number of Monk plagiarisms, chapbook and bluebook condensations, and dramatic adaptations is a large one and could probably constitute a separate area of bibliographical inquiry. Entries are current to 1995 with some work appearing in 1996 also included. Attesting to the lurid fascination and literary importance of The Monk for both specialists and generalists as well as devotees of the Gothic of every kind, the essays commemorate and celebrate the influence and impact of Lewis's enduring Gothic achievement. "'MONK' Lewis," Southern Literary Messenger (April 1849): 230-235. "TROLLOPE on The Monk," Nineteenth Century Fiction 4 (1949): 167.