![]() ![]() ![]() REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS William Beckford (1760–1844) A time of revolution and reason, madness and sanity, the 1750s through the 1850s provided the stuff that both dreams and nightmares were made of. In its attention to the dark side of human nature and the chaos of irrationality, the Gothic provides for contemporary readers some insight into the social and intellectual climate of the time in which the literature was produced. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ongoing fascination with horror, terror, the supernatural, vampires, werewolves, and other things that go bump in the night evinces the power the Gothic continues to exert. Hyde in the nineteenth century demonstrates both the transformation and the influence of the Gothic. Certainly, any close examination of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. There are those such as David Punter in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day and Fred Botting in Gothic who follow the transitions and transformations of the Gothic through the twentieth century. While it may be comparatively easy to date the beginning of the Gothic movement, it is much harder to identify its close, if indeed the movement did come to a close at all. The Castle of Otranto was soon followed by William Beckford's Vathek (1786) Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) Charles Brock-den Brown's Wieland (1797) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Walpole's novel was wildly popular, and his novel introduced most of the stock conventions of the genre: an intricate plot stock characters subterranean labyrinths ruined castles and supernatural occurrences. Finally, the Graveyard School of poetry, so called because of the attention its poets gave to ruins, graveyards, death, and human mortality, flourished in the mid-eighteenth century and provided a thematic and literary context for the Gothic. In addition, Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, offered a philosophical foundation. First, Walpole tapped a growing fascination with all things medieval, and medieval romance provided a generic framework for his novel. Although Horace Walpole is credited with producing the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, his work was built on a foundation of several elements. The Gothic, a literary movement that focused on ruin, decay, death, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ![]()
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