Literature
Gothic Novel
The Gothic novel is a genre of fiction that emerged in the 18th century, characterized by elements of horror, mystery, and the supernatural. These novels often feature eerie settings, melodramatic plots, and complex characters, and they explore themes such as the unknown, the macabre, and the psychological. Key examples of Gothic novels include Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Bram Stoker's "Dracula."
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
10 Key excerpts on "Gothic Novel"
eBook - PDF- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
Gothic Literature, 1764–1830 CONTEXTS A n ancient castle full of mysteries; a blood-soaked specter; a beautiful woman pursued through an underground passage; a nefarious monk; an atmosphere of fear and suspense: many of the ingredients that make up what we now call Gothic literature solidified into a recognizable formula during the Romantic era. For readers, the Gothic at its best offered an imaginative escape and, through fear, a sublime encounter with the limits of rational understanding. For critics, the Gothic at its worst represented the degradation of public taste and morality. The Gothic as a literary genre—with its castles, monasteries, dungeons, and graveyards—stemmed in part from what is known as the Gothic Revival, a faux medieval trend in architecture and interior decoration that became the dominant style of church architecture in the nineteenth century. One particularly influential early example is Strawberry Hill House (1749–76), an ordinary house that, under the direction of its owner, Horace Walpole, was transformed through a decades-long series of renovations into a fantastically ornate imitation Gothic castle. Not coincidentally, Walpole was living at Strawberry Hill when he wrote what is widely considered the first Gothic Novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). This novel established many of the conventions that came to be associated with the genre—supernatural occurrences, a heightened sense of the dramatic, atmospheric castles with secret passages, young heroines persecuted by villainous men. Much as present-day readers may trace the history of “the Gothic Novel” back to Otranto , writers and readers at the time did not use this term. To be sure, Walpole subtitled his book “A Gothic Story,” but by Gothic he meant medieval , and, by extension, irrational and uncivilized , without many of the associations that came to be regarded as characteristic of the genre.
- Dominic Head(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
2 Taking a broadly chronological approach, I identify the key trends in gothic and supernatural short fiction, from the emergence of the new literary magazines in the early nineteenth century to Victorian sensational gothic stories. 3 The roots of the literary gothic lie in the Enlightenment and subsequent Romantic backlash beginning in the late eighteenth century. Reacting against the Age of Reason, writers sought to emphasize the fantastical, inexplicable, ghostly and mysterious, evoking tensions between gothic and realism, 49 science and religion, nature and the supernatural, the rational and the irra- tional, as well as drawing on the anxieties provoked by contemporary events. These tensions are central to gothic fiction, and enable the exploration of other dichotomies: life/death; masculine/feminine; self/society. While gothic stories were produced primarily to entertain readers, like the Gothic Novel they also reflect a broader social and cultural mind-set, a historical period rife with anxieties about change and progress. With its varied forms, pervasive presence, tendency to provoke distaste in critics, and the terror it sought to elicit from readers, the gothic story functions as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster – its presence a constant reminder of something ‘other’, a perpetual ‘haunting’ of the nineteenth-century mind. Romantic Progenies: The Gothic Short Story in the Early Nineteenth Century In 1816, almost twenty years before Brontë’s parody of gothic fiction, a group of English friends, enabled to travel in Europe by a new freedom resulting from the recent conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, met at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva. It was a ‘wet, ungenial summer’, and they entertained themselves by reading Fantasmagoriana (1813) – a collection of German tales translated into French, which told of ghostly brides, supernatural curses, haunted castles and premature deaths. 4 Inspired by these, they began to write their own stories.
eBook - ePub- David Punter(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Fin de Siècle , ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Howells, Coral Ann (1978). Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction . London: Athlone Press.Hume, Robert D. (1969). “Gothic versus Romantic: a revaluation of the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 84, 282–90.Hurley, Kelly (1996). The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Jackson, Rosemary (1981). Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion . London: Methuen.Kilgour, Maggie (1995). The Rise of the Gothic Novel . London: Routledge.MacAndrew, Elizabeth (1979). The Gothic Tradition in Fiction . New York: Columbia University Press.McIntyre, Clara F. (1921). “Were the ‘Gothic Novels’ Gothic?” PMLA 36, 652–64.Miles, Robert (1995). Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress . Manchester: Manchester University Press.Pirie, David (1977). The Vampire Cinema . London: Hamlyn.Punter, David (1996). The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day , 2nd edn, 2 vols. Harlow: Longman.Sage, Victor (1988). Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition . London: Macmillan.Sage, Victor, ed. (1990). The Gothick Novel: A Casebook . London: Macmillan.Stoker, Bram (1993).Dracula (1897), ed. M. Hindle. London: Penguin.Summers, Montague (1938). The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel . London: Fortune Press.Tarr, Sister Mary Muriel (1946). Catholicism in Gothic Fiction . Washington, DC: Catholic University Press.Varma, Devendra P. (1957). The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England . London: Arthur Barker.Williams, Anne (1995). Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Wood, Robin (1983). “Burying the undead: the use and obsolescence of Count Dracula.” Mosaic
eBook - PDFWhen Highbrow Meets Lowbrow
Popular Culture and the Rise of Nobrow
- Peter Swirski, Tero Eljas Vanhanen, Peter Swirski, Tero Eljas Vanhanen(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
3 In practice, Radcliffe wrote a type of Gothic fiction sometimes referred to as the “explained supernatural,” because seemingly supernatural events would inevitably be found to have rational explanations. Generations of readers devoured her series of novels, starting with The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and proceeding through the famous The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) to the lesser-known Gaston de Blondeville (1826). One reason for her success was that Radcliffe engaged with issues at the cutting edge of political and aesthetic philosophy of her time, such as the nature and epistemology of modern subjectivity, gender, and moral philosophy. The generic similarity of her novels to each other and her use of Gothic conventions, however, brought charges of inauthenticity, emotional excess, and literary inferiority, especially by later writers working in a more safely realistic vein, such as Jane Austen. Yet Radcliffe’s inventive— not to say nobrow—mixing of intrigue, terror, and suspense with intricate stories of young female protagonists navigating through bewildering social conventions, sublime natural landscapes, and ruthless class politics and machinations entertained and educated readers throughout the nine- teenth century. Radcliffe’s example influenced many writers on both sides of the Atlantic, who have striven to combine literary ambitions with popular forms and audiences. Two iconic American writers of the nineteenth century—Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville—engaged with the nobrow dimension of the Gothic form in particularly interesting ways. Both used the Gothic and/or horror aesthetic as a way of combining higher philosophical and literary objectives with mass appeal in a ruthlessly commercial literary economy, which thrived on sensationalism and adventure. GOTHIC LITERATURE IN AMERICA 111
- Angela Wright, Dale Townshend(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
13 More recently, critics such as David Punter, Fred Botting and Vincent Quinn have argued along similar lines. 14 Other con- temporary scholars have traced back the origins of the Gothic to even more chronologically remote sources and periods, some seeing in the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, John Webster and other early modern dramatists clear evidence of a ‘premodern’, ‘early modern’ or ‘Renaissance Gothic’ literary tradition, with others identifying adumbrations of the Gothic even as far back as the writings of the fourteenth-century scholastic philoso- pher, theologian and biblical exegete John Wyclif and in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563). 15 12 Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, 2nd edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 16. 13 Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England (London: Arthur Baker Ltd, 1957), pp. 27–8. 14 See David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, revised edition, 2 vols (London: Pearson Education Ltd, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 30–7; Fred Botting, Gothic, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 30–3; and Vincent Quinn, ‘Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic’, in Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (eds), Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 37–54 (p. 37). 15 See John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (eds), Gothic Shakespeares (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008); Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (eds), Shakespearean Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); Elisabeth Bronfen and Beate Neumeier (eds), Gothic Renaissance: A Reassessment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); and Alison Milbank’s argument in God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). dale townshend 70
eBook - PDF- David Spurr(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Michigan Press(Publisher)
3 Allegories of the Gothic in the Long Nineteenth Century “The gothic gets away,” writes Henry Adams, musing on the Cathedral of Chartres in the summer of 1904: “No two men think alike about it, and no woman agrees with either” (87). Over a hundred years later, it is fair to say that medieval Gothic architecture still eludes us, not just in its own spirit and form but also as the object of such intense, even fanatical interest in Adams’s own age. Gothic religious architecture produced such a variety of responses in writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that one struggles to come to terms with the simple question of what made it so interesting and important to that moment in history. This chapter un-dertakes a preliminary answer to that question by proposing that, despite the variety of responses to the Gothic, one can nonetheless discern two general movements, both of them symptomatic of nineteenth-century Eu-ropean culture. The ‹rst is that of an inherent tension between an ahistor-ical aesthetics of transcendence and an emerging historical sense whereby the writer poses, explicitly or not, the question of what the aesthetic expe-rience means in terms of contemporary social forms. In other words, the aesthetic sense is put to the test of its ethical consequences, as writers ask, essentially, “What is our relation to the past?” and when the answer to that question registers an irreparable loss, it is followed by the question “How can we construct our world anew?” The second general movement effects a kind of withdrawal from the 99 larger cultural dimensions of these questions into an aesthetics of individ-ual reality, immediate experience, and fragmentary perception, a point of view characterized by Pater’s question as he contemplates the interior of Notre-Dame d’Amiens: “What, precisely what, is this to me ?” (“Notre-Dame” 113).
eBook - PDF- Christina Morin(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
Comparative analysis of these texts as at once gothic and historical thus provides a fresh perspective on the origins of British gothic literature. Tis is true not just in its re-integration of Leland’s tale into the literary history of the gothic, but also in its suggestion of a more nuanced understanding of the formal, generic, and ideological fuidity that produced the literary gothic. Te second section of this chapter further examines the intersection of historical and gothic modes in the eighteenth century, evaluating several texts that might be seen as the direct inheritors of the historical gothicism of Longsword and Te castle of Otranto. Published primarily in the period between Te castle of Otranto and what has been called ‘the efulgence of Gothic’ that occurred in the 1790s, 13 these texts defy the prevalent belief that the literary gothic lay relatively dormant in the 1770s and 1780s. 14 Fully engaged in negotiating the relationship between the present and the Gothic past – social, cultural, and political – these texts, including Anne Fuller’s Alan Fitz-Osborne (1789) and the works of James White (1759–99), beginning with Earl Strongbow (1789), demonstrate that Irish authors in the wake of Leland and Walpole routinely queried the meaning of a Gothic heritage to eighteenth-century Britain. Te fnal section of the chapter considers the mutable boundaries between gothic and historical modes in fction produced from 1814 and the ostensible introduction of ‘the historical novel’ onwards. Anne H. Stevens argues that gothic and historical fction began markedly to dif- ferentiate themselves by the 1790s, when ‘two separate traditions with two diferent and recognizable sets of features’ had emerged.
eBook - PDFDissecting Stephen King
From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism
- Heidi Strengell(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Popular Press 3(Publisher)
Copyrighted Material The Gothic in King's Works The main concerns of Stephen King's Gothic melodramas are clearly expressed in Bag of Bones and The Shining: (1) domestic violence, incest, and rape as well as romance (2) the revisiting of the sins of the fathers on their children, and (3) the archetype of the Ghost. King has frequently been referred to as a writer of melodramas. Somewhat ironically, another writer, Mike Noonan of Bag of Bones (1998), is called "v. C. Andrews with a prick" (BB, 25, 26; note that V. C. Andrews is a female writer of serialized melodramas). Bag of Bones can be viewed as equal parts a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, a mystery, and a psychological sus- pense story. A love story with supernatural overtones, it evokes Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938); other literary connections include Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1856) and Thomas Hardy. Among its several genres, the melodrama and the horror genre seem to stand out, and the most Gothic features about the novel are its sexually blurred relations between the protagonist, his dead wife, and his new lover. Originally struc- tured as a five-act Shakespearean tragedy, The Shining introduces the Torrances, who have locked themselves in with the ghosts of the past. The novel focuses on domestic violence and the past haunting the present. King and Walpole share several traits. E. J. Clery argues that Horace Walpole established a modern Gothic style of fiction: Gothic was no longer a historical description but marked the initi- ation of a new genre (ix, xv). Furthermore, Punter maintains that Otranto was the earliest and most important manifestation of the late eighteenth-century revival of romance, that is, of the older traditions of prose literature that had been supplanted by the rise of the novel (Terror, 1:44).
eBook - PDFThe Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 3, Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Volume 3: Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Catherine Spooner, Dale Townshend(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
We need only turn to the Irish tradition to see this distinction unravel, whether that be in Wilde’s taste for Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin, or in James Joyce’s spectral stories of Dubliners (1914) and his allusions to the Gothic – particularly Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1898) – in Ulysses (1922). It is perhaps the popular ghost story form, though, that a number of Modernists most explicitly attempted to modernise, rework and theorise afresh. Gothic, the Great War and the Rise of Modernism 49 Modernist Apparitions The Modernist moment saw a renewed interest in theorising the aesthetics of haunting. As Andrew Smith has put it, ‘the modernist cry for innovation subtly influenced’ the development of the ghost story. 22 The golden age of the ghost story is often posited as beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Le Fanu and culminating in the Edwardian writings of M. R. James. Yet, the ghost story remained a popular form – as did the short story itself – in the interwar period, with writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, May Sinclair and Oliver Onions experi- menting in the mode. 23 Literary networkers, such as the writer and socialite Cynthia Asquith, produced edited collections of spooky tales that featured many notable contributors. The Modernist take on the ghost story took shape during a period in which the Preface would come to the fore as a means of critically reflecting upon the seemingly paradoxical appeal of the literature of the supernatural to the rational, ‘modern’ mind. To name but a few examples, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Walter de la Mare each penned important Prefaces that explore the appeal of the ghost story to their contemporary audiences. Such Modernist calls to make new the literatures of terror and horror could also be said to include Woolf’s attack upon the Gothic romance that formed part of her review of Edith Birkhead’s 1921 study The Tale of Terror.
eBook - PDFFrom Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell
British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction
- S. Rowland(Author)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Even when later works acknowledge the decline of aristocratic society in the modern city, such as the Gothic eccentricity of the Palinodes in More Work for the Undertaker, detecting locates essential corruption in the capitalist banking system promoting the horrors of atomic technol- ogy. 70 More comically, Charlie Luke serves as another attempt to Gothically invoke a feudal order in modernity when his marriage to a desiccated aristocrat is explained as suitable because he too ‘has a manor’ in his own metropolitan police district. 71 Gothic spectres representing the horror of modernity and the fear of the extreme destructiveness of technology can also be found in works by the other writers. An horrific corpse in Marsh’s Dead Water is imagi- natively yoked to a nuclear battlefield, 72 while even Christie includes atomic spies as possible killers in Dead Man’s Folly. Peter Wimsey is, of course, constantly haunted by the horrific actualities of technological modern warfare; a Gothic mode intensified in P.D. James’s holocaust- Gothic art. Ruth Rendell, by contrast, seems to locate Gothic horror more in class than in reactions to technology. Her modernity is one in which outmoded class and gender structures make horrific and psychic returns through Gothic means of representation. The Rendell horror of modernity is of the persistent haunting of the present by the oppres- sive, exploitative past. These six authors demonstrate both the potency and ambivalence of the Gothic literacy tradition in their varying polit- ical and artistic attitudes to its spectres, its sublime horrors lurking in unmappable borders. 122 From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell Gothic Crimes 123 They Do It with Mirrors by Agatha Christie (1952) 73 In this Miss Marple novel appears the ghostly outline of the mock- Gothic Northanger Abbey. 74 Austen’s novel provides a naive reader of Gothic fiction, Catherine Morland, whose common sense is overcome by the Gothic architecture of the title setting.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
