User:Nevehendren/sandbox
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The female author Ann Radcliffe crafted the birth of the Female Gothic genre with the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1792).[1] The emergence of gothic fiction coincided with the rise of modern-day feminism. According to Moers, the Female Gothic can be simply defined as: "the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the gothic." [2] As Wallace notes: "Gothic is a notoriously slippery term, 'Female Gothic' perhaps even more contentiously so. Critics have argued over whether the Gothic is a literary form, genre, or sub-genre, a mode of writing, a set of conventions or a historical period."[3] As Shajirat notes: "While gothic ruins are typically discussed in terms of moldering castles and crumbling historical monuments, the Female Gothic tradition of the long eighteenth century calls attention to another set of ruins: the physical and mental decay the Gothic heroine undergoes on the path from childhood innocence to adult experience." [4]