Download Keys and Tools Gothic fiction : main features

Keys and Tools Gothic fiction : main features
Gothic fiction
Early Gothic fiction
18th century
Characters
- spectres, monsters,
demons, corpses, skeletons,
evil aristocrats, monks and
nuns, fainting heroines and
bandits .
Settings
- desolate, alienating
[landscapes] full of menace
or magical worlds
19th Century
- scientists, fathers,
husbands, madmen,
criminals, the monstrous
double.
- the castle, decaying, bleak
and full of hidden
passageways.
- the old house
- medieval edifices: abbeys,
churches and graveyards.
- the modern city with its
dark, labyrinthine streets
- mad scientists,
psychopaths,
extraterrestrials, strange
supernatural or naturally
monstrous mutations.
- alienating bureaucratic and
technological reality.
- psychiatric hospitals and
criminal subcultures.
- scientific, future and
intergalactic worlds.
- wild and mountainous
locations.
Sources
20th Century
- Myths, legends and folklore of medieval romances and tales of knights
- tortuous, fragmented
narratives relating
mysterious incidents.
Elements of the plot
- horrible images and lifethreatening pursuits.
- presentations of
supernatural, sensational,
and terrifying incidents,
imagined or not.
-Gothic motifs inside Science
fiction, the adventure novel,
modernist literature,fantasy,
romantic fiction and popular
horror writing.
Gothic fiction
End of the 18th
century:Early Gothic fiction
19th Century
20th Century
- chill the blood, delight superstitious fancies, feed appetites for marvellous and
strange events.
Effects on the reader
- ambivalent emotions: repugnance, disgust and recoil / engage interest, fascinate and
attract.
- threats spiced with thrills, terrors with delights, horrors with pleasure.
- (apparently) celebrate criminal behaviour, voracious passion, stimulate excitements
which blur definitions of reason and morality.
- reassert the values of society, virtue and propriety.
Aims of the Gothic fiction
- transgress social and aesthetic limits // underline their value and necessity.
- warn of dangers of social and moral transgression by presenting them in their
darkest and most threatening form.