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Origins 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 very 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. "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days – my hair standing on end the whole time." said Henry Developments in continental Europe, and The Monk At about the same time as the English Gothic, parallel Romantic literary movements developed in continental Europe: the roman noir ("black novel") in France (including such writers as François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Baculard d'Arnaud, and Madame de Genlis) and the Schauerroman ("shudder novel") in Germany (e.g. Christian Heinrich Spieß's Das Petermännchen, 1791/92) - which were often more horrific and violent than the English gothic novel. The fruit of this harvest of continental horrors was Matthew Gregory Lewis's lurid tale of monastic debauchery, black magic and diabolism The Monk (1796). Though Lewis's novel could be read as a sly, tongue-in-cheek spoof of the emerging genre, self-parody was a constituant part of the Gothic from the time of the genre's inception with Walpole's Otranto. Lewis's tale appalled some contemporary readers; however his portrayal of depraved monks, sadistic inquisitors and spectral nuns, and his scurrilous view of the Catholic church was an important development in the genre and influenced established terror-writer Anne Radcliffe in her last and finest novel The Italian (1797). In this book the hapless protagonists are ensnared in a web of deceit by a malignant monk called Schedoni and eventually dragged before the tribunals of the Inquisition in Rome, leading one contemporary to remark that if Radcliffe wished to transcend the horror of these scenes she would have to visit hell itself (Birkhead 1921). Some writings of the Marquis de Sade have also been called "gothic", though the marquis himself never thought of his work as such. Sade provided a critique of the genre in the preface of his Reflections on the novel (1800) that is still widely accepted today, stating that the gothic is "the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded". This correlation between the French revolutionary Terror and the "terrorist school" of writing represented by Radcliffe and Lewis was noted by contemporary critics of the genre. Sade considered The Monk to be superior to the work of Ann Radcliffe. One notable later writer in the continental tradition was E.T.A. Hoffmann. Parody The excesses and frequent absurdities of the traditional Gothic made it rich territory for satire. The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be somewhat more prosaic. Jane Austen's novel is valuable for including a list of early Gothic works since known as the Northanger Horrid Novels: The Romantics Further contributions to the Gothic genre was provided in the work of the Romantic poets. Prominent examples include Coleridge's Christabel and Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci which both feature fey lady vampires. In prose the celebrated ghost-story competition 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). This latter has been accounted by cultural critic Christopher Frayling as one of the most influential works of fiction ever written and spawned a craze for Vampire fiction and theatre (and latterly film) which still shows no sign of stopping. Mary Shelley's novel, though clearly influenced by the gothic tradition, is often considered the first science fiction novel. A late example of traditional Gothic is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin which combines themes of Anti-Catholicism with an outcast Byronic hero. Victorian Gothic Though 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, exemplified by the serial novel Varney the Vampire, in many ways Gothic was now entering its most creative phase - even if it was no longer the dominant literary genre. Gothic works of this period include the macabre, doom-laden work of Edgar Allan Poe. His superlative Fall of the House of Usher (1839) revisits classic Gothic tropes of aristocratic decay, death and madness, whilst the legendary villainy of the Spanish Inquisition, previously explored by Gothicists Radcliffe, Lewis and Maturin, is revisited in The Pit and the Pendulum. The influence of Ann Radcliffe is also detectable in Poe's The Oval Portrait, (including an honorory mention of her name in the text of the story). Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) transports the Gothic to the forbidding Yorkshire Moors and gives us ghostly apparitions and a Byronic anti-hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) adds the madwoman in the attic (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 1979) to the cast of gothic fiction. Elizabeth Gaskell's tales The Doom of the Griffiths (1858) Lois the Witch and The Grey Woman all employ one of the most common themes of Gothic fiction, the power of ancestral sins to curse future generations, or the fear that they will. The gloomy villain, forbidding mansion and persecuted heroine of Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas (1864) shows the direct influence of both Walpole's Otranto and Radcliffe's Udolpho. 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 and influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula. 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. His most explicitly Gothic work is his last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). 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. By the 1880s, it was time for the revival of the Gothic as a semi-respectable literary form. This was the period of the gothic works of Robert Louis Stephenson, Arthur Machen, and Oscar Wilde. The most famous gothic villain ever, Count Dracula was created by Bram Stoker in 1897. Post-Victorian legacy Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) is in many ways a reworking of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea again took Brontë's story, this time explicitly reworking it by changing the narrative point of view to one of the minor characters, a now popular but then innovative post-modern technique. 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 Southern Gothic genre, 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. The Southern Ontario Gothic applies a similar sensibility to a Canadian cultural context. The themes of the literary Gothic have been translated into other media such as the theatre and had a notable revival in twentieth century gothic horror films such the classic Universal horror films of the 1930's, Hammer Horror and Roger Corman's Poe cycle. Twentieth century popular music also drew on Gothic themes, eventually resulting in gothic rock and the goth subculture surrounding it. Themes from gothic writers such as H.P. Lovecraft were also used among 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 | ||||||||||
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