Tropes of the victorian gothic Flashcards
What does fin-de-siècle mean?
relating to the end of the 19th century, especially the art, culture, and morals of the period. It signifies themes of cultural decline. The fin-de-Siècle marked a transition from old to new, without the assurance that the future would bring continued enlightenment and improvement. It is the ambivalence of modernity. Gothic fiction provided a vehicle for exploring social transformations.
What are some major fin-de siecle themes?
growth of the city, the rise of the urban poor, challenges to the older victorian ideologies of gender and sexuality, doubts about the stability and validity of the empire, and fears about immigration. Developments of science.
What figures is familiar in fin-de-siecle gothic fiction?
The scientist and the monsters produced by scientific experimentation
What is meant by the abhuman?
A key characteristic of fin-de siecle gothic with its bodily morphing (gradually change from something to something else) characters; vampires, doubles, femme fatale
What is meant by the new woman?
Women who were taking advantage of the advantage of newly available educational and employment opp to brake free from the intellectual and social restraints imposed upon them by a male soceity
What are the difference between these viewpoints; first point, second, third, and omniscient?
First-person is The I reports from her/his point of view as a witness of the action or as the agent of the action.
second person is
third person is
omniscient: Allknowing about the story and its characters often written as third person narratives.
What is meant by the uncanny?
A kind of disturbing strangeness evoked in some story and related fiction. Sigmund Freud propose in (1919) that the apparantely strange is a disguised representation of what is in fact familiar. Think Edgar Allans Poe “The telltale heart”
What is meant by the double
what is meant by the sensation novel
An early kind of thriller that exposes dark secrets and conspiracies, but is distinguished from the classic detective story by its lack of a central detective figure.
When did Charles Darwin write the origin of spesielt?
1859
According to Darwin, what could evolution do?
Work in reverse in certain circumstances, returning a complex and civilized being to the state of primitivism, from which it had emerged.
What phenomen were “evidence” of the existence of a subgroup of human beings in whom evolution was working backwards?
Crime, poverty, mental illness, perverts, homoseksualitet, the New woman, decadent art and philosophy, vulnerability of empire to rebellion in the colonies
Who wrote The blood of the vampire?
Florence Marryat in 1897
who wrote Dracula?
Bram Stoker in 1897
Who wrote carmilla?
Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872
