American Gothic
"American Gothic" refers to a literary genre characterized by its portrayal of rural life, often featuring themes of isolation, fear, and the supernatural. It is closely associated with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is known for its exploration of the darker aspects of American society and the human psyche.
4 Key excerpts on "American Gothic"
eBook - ePubThe Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic
Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
- Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The current understanding of the American Gothic has completely reversed this view of its political meaning. However, with a few notable exceptions, the word “gothic” scarcely figured in American literary scholarship until the 1980s. Literature departments in the first postwar decades were dominated by Richard Chase’s so-called “Romance Thesis,” the main point of which was to insist that American literature was very different from the British. Accordingly, American fiction was supposedly characterized by the “romance” genre, while the British was characterized by realism. In this context, even if a critic accepted that there was a “dark” strain of American writing, he would not have called it “gothic” because, first of all, this term was too closely linked to British literature, and second, it sounded too much like the airport novels for women which happened to also be called “gothic romances” in the 50s and 60s. In short, the word “gothic” had both British and female connotations that made it unappealing to American scholars as a label for American literature. 12 Although Irving Malin wrote a study called New American Gothic in 1962, the terms “American” and “Gothic” remain distinctly unrelated in his book. Malin’s homophobic and judgmental survey of contemporary American fiction finds that it is peopled by homosexuals and perverts and other “freaks,” hence the word “gothic,” but this gothicism is not itself American in any way. The literature is American because it is written in America, but the sexual misfits that it has produced in no way reflect on the history or meaning of American society...
eBook - ePubThe Literature of Terror: Volume 1
The Gothic Tradition
- David Punter(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 7 Early American Gothic Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe DOI: 10.4324/9781315843476-7 American Gothic is, as it were, a refraction of English: where English Gothic has a direct past to deal with, American has a level interposed between present and past, the level represented by a vague historical ‘Europe’, an often already mythologised ‘Old World’. Washington Irving described Europe as being rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement – to tread, as it were, in the footsteps of antiquity – to loiter about the ruined castle – to meditate on the falling tower – to escape, in short, from the common-place realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past. 1 This kind of sensibility is familiar in the Gothic tradition from Walpole to Ainsworth, but the British writers did not have far to go to seek sites for their meditations; the fact that the Americans did, that the effort of imagining a distant past from the perspective of the early nineteenth century was incomparably greater in the New World, may go some way to explaining the distinctive features of American Gothic: its darkness, its tendency towards obsession, its absorption with powerful and evil Europeans. Why American Gothic should also be intensely preoccupied with the pathology of guilt, perhaps the most important link between its three principal early protagonists, Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, is more problematic: but one factor has to be Puritanism and its legacy, which is the point at which the work of these Americans connects emotionally with the historical reinterpretations of the British writers. Charles Brockden Brown, renowned as America’s first professional man of letters, was born in 1771 in Philadelphia, at that time a city of great importance...
eBook - ePubMaps of Heaven, Maps of Hell
Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King
- Edward Ingebretsen(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...One could argue that the Gothic tradition represents the final fate of interiority, the last resting place of spiritual energy driven by the Enlightenment underground—or into the new world of fantasy and geopolitics. Indeed, a Gothic sensibility has marked American literature from before the founding of the Republic, providing a focus for the theological zeal of a culture that is Protestant by historical choice and confessional by civic strategy. 47 In Redefining the American Gothic, Louis S. Gross argues that the Gothic vision of a world of darkness, terror, oppression, and perversity, seemingly so alien from the rational bias of the Founding Fathers, is as pervasive in our national consciousness as its daylight opposite. The texts Americans have traditionally viewed as the reflection of national identity—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have their counter images, images in the long line of Gothic texts that show the land, people, and institutions of this country as participants in the nightmare of history (p. 89). America’s dark fantasies, then, can be read as the story a culture does not wish to tell about itself, but which, nonetheless, it necessarily speaks. Chesterton remarked that the United States was a country with the soul of a church. And, he might have added, with the psyche of an abandoned church. Its tales are religious with a vengeance: not a binding back, but a binding up—even, in some cases, a throttling. It is a truism of narrative that we are heroes of our own stories. Or, less flatteringly, that the stories we tell tell us. The continuing evocation of religious terror affirms a profoundly central dimension of American public experience...
eBook - ePub- Alfred Bendixen, Alfred Bendixen(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Selected Readings in the Genres of the American Novel This section provides a list of selected readings for some of the most important traditions and genres that mark the American novel. Each list consists of 30 works that have been chosen to represent the diversity and vitality of specific aspects of the novel in the United States. No author is cited twice in the same list, but a few are listed in multiple categories. Although many of the texts chosen have received considerable critical attention, in some cases the works offered reflect a popular tradition that the editor believes merits more attention. Of course, none of these lists should be regarded as definitive statements of the fixed value of any work, and it would be possible for other scholars to come up with substantially different compilations. These lists are designed to serve as points of departure for scholars, teachers, and students, but they are also intended for the general reader who wishes to engage in a fuller exploration of some of the traditions covered or mentioned elsewhere in this Companion. Alfred Bendixen 1 The Gothic Tradition in the American Novel 2 American Historical Novels 3 Feminist Traditions in the American Novel 4 American Political and Social Novels 5 American Novels About War 6 American Comic Novels 7 Westerns by American Novelists 8 American Novels of Crime and Detection 9 American Novels of Science Fiction 10 American Gay and Lesbian Novels 11 Jewish American Novels 12 African American Novels 13 Latino/a American Novels 1 The Gothic Tradition in the American Novel Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799) Sarah Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800) Isaac Mitchell, The Asylum (1811) John Neal, Logan: A Family History (1822) Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee:...
