‘Endless circumlocutions’: Speaking To and Away from the Point Before and After Melmoth the Wanderer

Circumlocution has been an important stylistic feature of the Gothic novel since its inception in the eighteenth century. Might this rhetorical feature be thought of in national or even geopolitical terms? Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe in the eighteenth century had linked circumlocution to a Shakespearean blending of comedy and tragedy that marked a distinctively British artistic sensibility against the constraints of French neo-classicism. However, Maturin’s use of the trope in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought in new national and transnational inflections linked to the central character’s own ability to circle around the world and the presence of colonised others within the text. This article asks whether circumlocution after Maturin’s novel becomes an end in itself, a walking around the borders of speech and meaning that would appeal to later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire.