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. Lloyd-Smith here defines the gothic as a "reactionary form" that "explores chaos and wrongdoing in a movement toward the ultimate restitution of order and convention" (5).Ĭhapter 1, "What is American Gothic," is then followed by two brief chapters consisting of a timeline of the growth and development of the American Gothic and a chapter entitled "How to Read American Gothic." The timeline includes not only the dates of publication for American gothic works, but.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. After a brief two-page introduction that foregrounds the importance of repetition to the genre, both in the sense of later authors working within an established generic tradition and in the sense of the return of the repressed, the book begins with a seven-page overview of the American gothic that introduces general aspects of gothic literature, such as its emphasis on the sublime, the distinction between terror and horror (which is poorly explained), and its focus on extreme emotional states, as well as specifically American cultural anxieties that influenced the development of the American gothic including the frontier experience, the legacy of Puritanism, anxieties about radical democracy, and issues of racial difference. ![]() ![]() Alan Lloyd-Smith, who is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of East Anglia and who is the author of Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa's Face (Macmillan 1989) and co-editor with Victor Sage of Gothick: Origins and Innovations (Editions Costerus-Rodopi 1994), is an established scholar of the American gothic and a good choice to author the text.Īmerican Gothic Fiction more or less follows the series template outlined above. (The other two currently out are on Native American Literatures and Irish Fiction, with forthcoming titles on Fantasy, Horror, Crime Fiction, and Science Fiction.) These relatively short texts (exclusive of annotated bibliography, glossary, and index, American Gothic Fiction clocks in around 160 pages) all more or less follow the same nine-part template: a broad definition of the genre, a timeline of its historical development, critical concerns to bear in mind while reading, detailed readings of several key texts, in-depth analysis of major themes and issues, "signposts" for future study, a summary of significant critical works, a glossary, and an annotated reading list of additional critical sources. $21.95.Īmerican Gothic Fiction: An Introduction is one of the first three entries in Continuum's "Studies in Literary Genre" series. ![]() American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction.
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