Kerry Dean Carso, ‘Banditti Mania’: the Gothic Haunting of Washington Allston. Symbiosis 11.1 (April 2007) 105-130.

This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 11.1 (April 2007) pp. 109-130. This shorter version lacks the seven plates used to illustrate the original.

Essay Topics and Keywords:

American painter Washington Allston (1779–1843); Landscape with Banditti; Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho; Salvator Rosa; Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery; Henry Fuseli, Hamlet and the Ghost; etc.

An extract from this essay:

“Despite Allston’s occasional embarrassment at his reading habits, he allowed the Gothic to seep into his artistic work. He painted images from Gothic novels, chose supernatural subjects for his paintings, and even wrote his own Gothic novel, Monaldi (1842). Allston considered his painting Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand (1831; fig. 2), a scene taken directly from a Radcliffe novel, one of his best paintings. Rather than uphold Allston’s embarrassment at his predilection for the terrific and the macabre by marginalizing the importance of his Gothic reading, we can embrace his ‘banditti mania’ and finally fully comprehend his work within the context of an Anglo-American Gothic literary culture.”

Kerry Dean Carso

Affiliation: State University of New York, New Paltz