PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
2025
“‘There Are Also Other Possibilities, My Sister’: A Republican Politics of Incest in Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Italian“ — European Romantic Review (under review)
The Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe (née Ward, 1764–1823) occupy an ambiguous position concerning the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s. Scholarship on Radcliffe’s ideological allegiances vacillates between textual contradictions in her use of romance form and biographical evidence, the latter evasive given the discreet character of the author’s personal life. This article performs readings of two Radcliffe novels, The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796), demonstrating how she experimented with politically coded representations of transgressive sexuality during the 1790s Revolution Controversy in Britain. This period saw a series of consequential debates on the republicanism of the French Revolution and its influence on both sides of the English Channel; the article examines how Radcliffe invested the threat of incest in her Gothic scenarios with terms and figures that circulated between the writings of Richard Price (1723–1791), Edmund Burke (1729–1797), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and Thomas Paine (1737–1809).
2024
“‘Whichever Way You Move . . . It is Ready to Swallow You’: The Gothic Atlantic and the Mobile Oubliette” — Studies in Romanticism 63.4
In this article I offer a reading of the Gothic novel and the slave narrative with regard to the discursive currents that connect them. Adapted from the first chapter of my dissertation, the article examines the transformation of the oubliette — a vertical dungeon whose name derives from the French oublier [to forget] — from an architectural symbol of ancien régime tyranny into a portable trope responsive to the atrocities of Atlantic slavery. It performs site-specific readings of this tropology in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), and William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). The article explicates the psychological and political figuration of a form of carceral architecture that has received sparse attention in prior scholarship, despite its notable recurrence in both fiction and nonfiction texts throughout the long eighteenth century.
ONLINE
2025 – present
Notes on Cinema — film studies blog (oliverbedard.com)
A blog dedicated to critical reflections on cinema, especially those films pertinent to the Gothic mode and its trans-medial cultural history. Featuring original illustrations, Notes on Cinema is the blueprint for a book project, Cinema of the Gothic, which investigates topoi of power/control, body horror and abjection, the mediated afterlives of the Enlightenment, and the relationship of terror/horror aesthetics to surveillance and gouvernementalité. These notes may be read as the groundwork for this larger inquiry or for their own sake, as records of cinematic affects, effects, and meditations.
2018
“Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1835)” — Moveable Type: Print Material in Special Collections (UVic Libraries)
University of Victoria Library Special Collections Omeka publication on an 1835 pocket edition of Radcliffe’s 1791 novel. This online exhibition details the book traces and lifespan of a cheaply-printed edition of this Gothic romance, one of many of its kind in the nineteenth century, examining the unique precariousness of such print objects and how, in spite and as a result of their decaying material condition, they continue to offer hermeneutic opportunities in an age of prolific digitization.
OLIVER BEDARD 