"An ambitious, readable, and well-argued book, The Contested Castle ... presents useful, sometimes radical re-readings of familiar and unfamiliar gothic texts; it also takes important steps toward demonstrating, as Ellis puts it, 'that popular literature can be a site of resistance to ideological positions as well as a means of propagating them'
an argument of considerable importance for scholars in and ... Read moreadvanced students of critical theory."
Choice "Ellis sheds special light on the way capitalist relations and the culture of capitalism influenced the way women lived, envisioned, wrote, and read their own narratives. It's a story at least as gripping and at least as terrifying as the male and female Gothics that Ellis so gracefully presents and interprets."
Lillian S. Robinson, author of Sex, Class, and Culture "The strength of Ellis's The Contested Castle is in its linking of the Gothic novel with a bourgeois ideology that specified the role and place of women in its system... In the light of her work, not only the Gothic novel but the rise of the novel and the realist novel will be reread as well."
Mary O'Connor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction Show Less