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Gothic Literature began in the United Kingdom with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. It depended for its effect on the pleasing terror it induced in the reader, a new extension of literary pleasures that was essentially Romantic. It is the predecessor of modern horror fiction and, above all, has led to the common definition of "gothic" as being connected to the dark and horrific.

Prominent features of gothic fiction include terror (psychological as well as physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness (especially mad women), secrets, hereditary curses, persecuted maidens and so on.

Important ideas concerning and influencing the Gothic include: Anti-Catholicism, especially criticism of Catholic excesses such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain); romanticism of an ancient Medieval past; melodrama; and parody (including self-parody).

Origins of the Gothic

The term "gothic" was originally a disparaging term applied to a style of medieval architecture (Gothic architecture) and art (Gothic art). The opprobrious term "gothick" was embraced by the 18th century proponents of the gothic revival, a forerunner of the Romantic genres. Gothic revival architecture, which became popular in the nineteenth century, was a reaction to the classical architecture that was a hallmark of the Age of Reason.

In a way similar to the gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the term "gothic" became linked with an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrill of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations— thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Protestants often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic and superstitious rituals.

The first gothic romances

The term "gothic" came to be applied to the literary genre precisely because the genre dealt with such emotional extremes and dark themes, and because it found its most natural settings in the buildings of this style - castles, mansions, and monasteries, often remote, crumbling, and ruined. It was a fascination with this architecture and its related art, poetry (see Graveyard Poets), and even landscape gardening that inspired the first wave of gothic novelists. For example, Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto is often regarded as the first true gothic romance, was obsessed with fake medieval gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking off a fashion for gothic revival.

Walpole's novel arose out of this obsession with the medieval. He originally claimed that the book was a real medieval romance he had discovered and republished. Thus was born the gothic novel's association with fake documentation to increase its effect. Indeed, The Castle of Otranto was originally subtitled A Romance -- a literary form held by educated taste to be tawdry and unfit even for children, due to its superstitious elements -- but Walpole revived some of the elements of the medieval romance in a new form. The basic plot created many other gothic staples, including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as countless trappings such as hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines.

It was however Ann Radcliffe who created the gothic novel in its now-standard form. Among other elements, Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which developed into the Byronic hero. Unlike Walpole's, her novels, beginning with The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), were best-sellers, and virtually everyone in English society was reading them.

France and Germany

At about the same time, parallel Romantic literary movements developed in continental Europe: the roman noir ("black novel") in France and the Schauerroman ("shudder novel") in Germany.

Writers of the roman noir include François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Baculard d'Arnaud, and Madame de Genlis. Some writings of the Marquis de Sade have also been called "gothic". Sade provided a critique of the genre in his Reflections on the novel (1800), considering The Monk to be superior to the work of Ann Radcliffe.

The German Schauerroman was often more horrific and violent than the English gothic novel, and may have influenced Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796) in this regard. One notable writer was E.T.A. Hoffman.

The Romantics

Further contributions to the Gothic genre was provided in the work of the Romantic poets. The celebrated ghost-story telling session between Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 was productive of both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819).

Victorian Gothic

It is sometimes asserted that the Gothic had played itself out by the Victorian era and had declined into the cheap horror fiction of the "penny dreadful" type which retailed the strange surprising adventures of such as Varney the Vampire. However, though no longer the dominant literary genre, in many ways Gothic was now entering its most creative phase. Gothic works of this period include the macabre, death obsessed work of Edgar Allen Poe whose Fall of the House of Usher (1839) revisits classic Gothic tropes of aristocratic decay, death and madness. The Byronic madness of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) and the gloomy villain, forbidding mansion and persecuted heroine of Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas (1864) show that the genre was not dead. Le Fanu's short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) includes the superlative vampire tale Carmilla which provided fresh blood for that particular strand of the Gothic. The genre was also a heavy influence on more mainstream writers such as Charles Dickens, who read gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting. The mood and themes of the gothic novel held a particular fascination for the Victorians, with their morbid obsession with mourning rituals, Mementos, and mortality in general.

Post-Victorian legacy

By the 1880s, it was time for a revival of the Gothic as a semi-respectable literary form. This was the period of the gothic works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen, and Oscar Wilde, and the most famous gothic villain ever appeared in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Other notable writers included Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, and H.P.Lovecraft. Lovecraft's protégé, Robert Bloch, penned the gothic horror classic, Psycho, which drew on the classic interests of the genre. From these, the gothic genre per se gave way to modern horror fiction, although many literary critics use the term to cover the entire genre, and many modern writers of horror (or indeed other types of fiction) exhibit considerable gothic sensibilities -- examples include the works of Anne Rice, as well as some of the less sensationalist works of Stephen King.

The genre also influenced American writing to create the genre of Southern Gothic literature, which combines some Gothic sensibilities (such as the Grotesque) with the setting and style of the Southern United States. Examples include William Faulkner, Harper Lee, and Flannery O'Connor. Also see Southern Ontario Gothic, which applies a similar sensibility to a Canadian cultural context.

The themes of the Gothic have had innumerable children. It led to the modern horror film, one of the most popular of all genres seen in films. While few classical composers drew on gothic works, twentieth century popular music drew on it strongly, eventually resulting in gothic rock and the goth subculture surrounding it. Themes from gothic writers such as H.P. Lovecraft were also used amongst heavy metal bands, especially in black metal, death metal and gothic metal. More recently, the gothic tradition has been expanded to new media forms on the internet.

Prominent examples

Gothic satire

See also

References

David Stevens "The Gothic Tradition" ISBN 0 521 777321

External links

Gothic novels | Literature | Speculative fiction | 18th century books | 19th century books

Gotický román | Schauerroman | Literatura de terror gótico | Roman gothique | Gothic (literatuur) | ゴシック小説 | Gothic novel | gotycyzm | Romance gótico | Готический роман | Göticism | 哥特小说

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Gothic Literature".

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