Gothic genres and eras Flashcards
(10 cards)
Eighteenth-century Gothic tropes
Romantic era Gothic tropes
The 1790s was the peak of Romantic/Gothic literature, with writers such as Shelley, Byron and Radcliffe adopting a hybrid genre of Gothicism and the Romantic preoccupation with the sublime.
the Romantic era pulled upon the power of the sublime, but less so on the physical overpowering of nature and more on its influence on the poet’s imagination
- the boundary between Gothic and Romanticism was often blurred
- love, vengeance, violence, daemonic or vampirical protagonists
- the Byronic hero
- the german ‘shudder novel’ evidenced the interconnection between the Gothic and Romanticism
Nineteenth-century Gothic tropes
1800 - 1890s
- drawing upon realism and the gothic
- The gothic becomes domesticated and internalised
- fears of human mutability
- female gothic
- pyschological terror
- blurred boundaries of the foreign and safe
- Inescapability of terror
Fin de Siecle tropes
1890s
- monsterism of modernity
- fears of disease and moral corruption
- doubling and dopplegangers to express fears of human corruption
- Instability of the self
- scientific progression
- social divides and power struggles
- cosmic horror (apparent meaninglessness of humanity)
texts
Oscar Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray
Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Modern Gothic tropes
- confronts the monstrousness of Western modernity
- individual, cultural and social alienation
-Modern texts do not make it clear if supernatural interventions are real or imagined and by extension, construct tension between haunting and hallucinations
Post-Modern and contemporary Gothic
post-war 1945 - present
- apocalyptic or distorted recreations of our society
- plays with Victorian Gothic themes of the ‘domesticated gothic’ within familiar settings
- continuity between the past and present
- discussions of social conflicts and anxiety (technological advancement and loss of identity within consumerism)
- gender identity and social taboos
Southern Gothic
19th century (most notably between the 1940 - 1960s)
- exploration of old American values
- the physical setting is used to reflect the character’s internal turmoil
- a sense of isolation - Blanche ‘incongruous’
- Freudian theme of the repressed
The female gothic tropes
Late 18th to early 19th century
- An exploration of explicitly female gothic horrors within the domestic sphere
- created by Ann Radcliffe, the Mother of Gothic
- The trapped female character is used as a tool to interrogate the political and social anxieties of the era
-Female Gothic literature has been described as “reflect[ing] the ideological goals of second-wave feminist literary criticism - manifests internal fears of female condemnation
- Supernatural is used to express the terrors of docility
- imagery of entrapment through marriage, motherhood and by extension womanhood
- reveals the female desire to be free from societal pressures
Victorian Gothic tropes
- greater focus on bringing the ‘gothic’ closer through psychological terror rather than physical manifestations such as the supernatural
- Detective-style narratives
- victorian domestic realism
- sense of otherness is produced through the setting, rather than the supernatural
- multiple narrative perspectives
- the detective aspect positioned the reader as the detective, to discover and interrogate political anxieties of the time
- developed into the American gothic (southern), which explored specific national tensions and anxieties
Castle of Otranto
Warpole titled the novel ‘A Gothic Story’ as a joke to imply that the story was a historical relic rather than merely a work of fiction.
Gothic supposedly referenced the ‘barbaric’ or ‘medieval ages’ which suggested that the taboo and supernatural elements of the novel were a critique of past ideologies within our society.
