My thesis draws connections between today's network society and the workings of gothic literature in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. Just as our society is formed and affected by the flow of information, the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility was formed by the merging and flow of scientific "technology" (or new scientific discoveries) and societal norms and rules. Gothic literature was born out of this science-society network, and in many ways embodies the ruptures implicit in it. Although gothic literature is not a network in the same sense as informationalism and the culture of sensibility are, gothic literature works according to the logic of networks on both a microscopic and macroscopic level. These correlations between networks and the gothic potentially illuminate two of gothic literature's strange and signature qualities: the subversive nature of the gothic convention, as well as the incredible—and almost inexplicable, considering its libeled and unpopular reputation—staying power of the genre. In Chapter One, I compare the society of informationalism and the eighteenth-century society of sensibility in order to extrapolate a three-pronged logic of networks: networks are subversive, networks are exclusive, and networks are based on codes. In Chapter Two I trace this logic through eighteenth-century gothic conventions as they are portrayed in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian and Matthew Lewis's The Monk. This shows how the gothic, like network society, depends on the paradox of containing the ideology that it subverts. In Chapter Three I investigate this paradox on a macroscopic level by examining the connections between "tales of terror" in Blackwood's Magazine and gothic literature in both the pre-Romantic and Victorian literature. By both adopting and subverting the conventions of Radcliffean gothic, these tales are a key node in the web of the gothic stretching backwards to into the eighteenth century, forwards into the nineteenth century, and beyond.

"Endymion" è il traît d'union tra i juvenilia di Keats ("Poems", 1817) e i suoi lavori più conosciuti ("Lamia, Isabella ... and other Poems"). Per sua natura, è un'opera di transizione e quindi concede allo studioso un punto di vista privilegiato sullo sviluppo della poetica e della lingua di Keats. Inoltre, l'"Endymion" è l'opera keatsiana più aspramente contestata dalla critica romantica. Gli studiosi moderni hanno analizzato il problema alla luce di considerazioni socio-politiche, il mio lavoro mira invece ad un'analisi più strettamente linguistica. Ricostruisco il contesto linguistico del diciottesimo e diciannovesimo secolo al fine di spiegare il disagio dei recensori nei confronti di "Endymion". Sostengo che il prescrittivismo del Settecento nasce da una profonda ansia relativa alla lingua, causata dalle teorie di Locke. L'atteggiamento prescrittivista influenza la critica romantica e i critici di Keats in particolare, più di quanto potessero fare considerazioni di natura politica. Analizzo le peculiarità linguistiche e strutturali di "Endymion" al fine di provare che Keats elabora una 'poetica dell'incontrollabilità', una serie di strategie stilistiche e testuali, che violano le convenzioni linguistiche e narrative e che vengono quindi percepite come destabilizzanti e stranianti. / "Endymion" is the traît d’union between Keats’s juvenilia ("Poems", 1817)and his better known, and, conventionally, ’mature’ works ("Lamia, Is- abella ... and other Poems", 1820). By its nature, it is a transitional work, and thus gives the scholar special insight into the development of Keats’s poetics and idiom. Moreover, "Endymion" is the Keatsian work which most irritated and provoked contemporary critics; the two pieces of venomous invective it received in the periodical press of the time have become the stuff of scholarly legend. Recent scholarly work has analysed the language of "Endymion" in socio-political terms; my work focuses on more strictly linguistic concerns. I reconstruct the linguistic context of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to explain the reviewers’ unease with regard to "Endymion". I maintain that eighteenth-century prescriptivism arose from a deep-seated anxiety regarding language, Lockian in origin, and that the ensuing desire to stabilize and therefore control language informed Romantic criticism in general, and the criticism of Keats’s work in particular, more fundamentally than politics could or did. I analyse the imaginative and linguistic markers of "Endymion" in order to prove that Keats had elaborated a “poetics of uncontrollability”, a series of textual and stylistic strategies, which violated linguistic and narrative standards and were therefore perceived as unsettling.