The English Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) - a very dull book.
The novel was so enormously popular (at that time) that it was quickly imitated by other novelists, thereby initiating a genre.
The first great practitioner of the Gothic novel, as well the most popular and best paid novelist of the eighteenth century England, was Ann Radcliffe. She added suspense, painted evocative landscapes and moods or atmsophere, portrayed increasingly complex, fascinatingly-horrifyingly evil villains, and focused on the heroine and her struggle with him. Her best works–A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), with the irredeemably malevolent monk, Schedoni–still have the ability to enthrall readers.
In 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein introduced the theme of the dangers of science.
Moving forwards to the 1960s. These novels follow a pattern: an innocent, inexperienced, young heroine suspects her superior suitor or husband, who is usually older, often wealthy, and worldly-wise of a crime; she may have to compete with an older woman for his affections, a competition she of course wins. The book covers are typically sterotyped, with a young woman fleeing a mansion or castle in the background. Modern Gothic's content and appeal is... is to women who marry guys and then begin to discover that their husbands are strangers... so there's a simultaneous attraction/repulsion, love/fear going on. Most of the "pure" Gothics tend to have a handsome, magnetic suitor or husband who may or may not be a lunatic and/or murderer...it remained for women to discover they were frightened of their husbands.
A tendency to the macabre and bizarre which appears in writers like William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor has been called Southern Gothic. The contemporary writers James Purdy, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Hawkes have been linked under the name of New American Gothic.
Gothicism is related to romanticism. The two movements are connected chronologically, use many of the same themes, like the hero-villain with a secret, and deal with psychological processes.
The eighteenth century Gothic writers are often described as precursors to Romanticism because they valued sensibility, exalted the sublime, and appealed to the reader's imagination.
Gothic elements appear in Romantic poetry like Samuel Coleridge's Christabel, " Lord Byron's "The Giaour, " and John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes."
Elements of the Gothic have also made their way into mainstream writing. They are found in Sir Walter Scott's novels, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
2006-11-13 20:57:05
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answer #1
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answered by Anonymous
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question anybody else hate reproduction-pasting answerers? party: Q: what percentage brothers did Dracula have? A: Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its familiar antagonist the vampire count number Dracula. Dracula has been attributed to many literary genres consisting of vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel and invasion literature. Structurally that is an epistolary novel, it really is, informed as a chain of diary entries and letters. Literary critics have examined many concern concerns contained in the unconventional, which incorporates the placement of ladies people in Victorian lifestyle, common and conservative sexuality, immigration, colonialism, postcolonialism and folklore. besides the undeniable fact that Stoker did not invent the vampire, the unconventional's impression on the popularity of vampires has been singularly responsible for most theatrical and film interpretations by the twentieth and 21st centuries. Your answer
2016-11-29 03:00:58
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answer #2
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answered by marconi 4
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Go on amazon and search "Gothic Fiction" - three pages of gothic textbooks appear for guidance on the whole genre
2006-11-15 03:23:37
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answer #3
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answered by PAULA S 2
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