It’s common to find ghosts and other paranormal phenomena in Gothic literature as well as mystery, fear, suspense and a healthy dose of melodrama. Gothic literature is known for featuring the supernatural, blending horror and romance, and the emphasis on setting, feeling, and atmosphere. It focuses on death, terror, chaos, passion, and ruin, and at times romance, and was a response to the surroundings (historical, psychological, etc.) of the late 18 th century and early 19 th century. Gothic literature is a movement and a subgenre of fiction. If you want to peek at the source of these pictures, just click on the board. There’s so much I could say about this subject, as it includes most of my favorite stories and authors, but for the sake of not rambling, I tried to keep my wits about me.īut first, let me share my Gothic literature mood board I made with pins I found on Pinterest to you know, get you in the mood…for a Gothic discussion! Today I wanted to talk about Gothic literature and tell you a little more about it. There have already been some fabulous posts like Both Things I Know About Gothic Horror I Learned from Jane Austen Who Learned from Ann Radcliffe from Erica Davis and My Favorite Gothics from Jenna Lehne. For Wordsworth, for instance, heir of the genteel sentimentality of the eighteenth century, gothic sensationalism seemed merely a response (compounding the ill to which it responded) to the decay of sensibility in an industrialized and brutalized world-in which men had grown so callous that only shock treatments of increasing intensity could move them to react.įrom Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel.It’s Gothic Horror month here at The Midnight Society. Some would say, indeed, that the whole tradition of the gothic is a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement, a reversion to the childish game of scaring oneself in the dark, or a plunge into sadist fantasy, masturbatory horror. It is as if such romancers were pursuing some ideal of absolute atrocity which they cannot quite flog their reluctant imaginations into conceiving… It is not enough that his protagonist commit rape he must commit it upon his mother or sister and if he himself is a cleric, pledged to celibacy, his victim a nun, dedicated to God, all the better! Similarly, if he commits murder, it must be his father who is his victim and the crime must take place in darkness, among the decaying bodies of his ancestors, on hallowed ground. Dedicated to producing nausea, to transcending the limits of taste and endurance, the gothic novelist is driven to seek more and more atrocious crimes to satisfy the hunger for “too-much” on which he trades. Aristotle’s guides for achieving the tragic without falling into “the abominable” are stood on their heads, “the abominable” itself being made the touchstone of effective art. More than that, however, the gothic is the product of an implicit aesthetic that replaces the classic concept of nothing-in-excess with the revolutionary doctrine that nothing succeeds like excess. The titillation of sex denied, it offers its readers a vicarious participation in a flirtation with death-approach and retreat, approach and retreat, the fatal orgasm eternally mounting and eternally checked. The primary meaning of the gothic romance, then, lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central theme of fiction.
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