SOURCE: Gamer, Michael. “Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama.” ELH 66, no. 4 (winter 1999): 831-57.

In the following essay, Gamer discusses the Gothic dramas of Matthew Lewis and Sir Walter Scott.

Of genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening of human sensibility … of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before. … Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown. … Therefore to create taste is to call forth and bestow power, of which knowledge is the effect.

—William Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface¹

We owe our modern idea of an author to the radical reconceptualization...