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| What is Gothic? |
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Gothic Literature:
"Word History: The combination Gothic romance represents a union of two of the major influences in the development of European culture, the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes that invaded it. The Roman origins of romance must be sought in the etymology of that word, but we can see clearly that Gothic is related to the name Goth used for one of those invading Germanic tribes. The word Gothic, first recorded in 1611 in a reference to the language of the Goths, was extended in sense in several ways, meaning Germanic, medieval, not classical, barbarous, and also an architectural style that was not Greek or Roman. Horace Walpole applied the word Gothic to his novel The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story (1765) in the sense medieval, not classical. From this novel filled with scenes of terror and gloom in a medieval setting descended a literary genre still popular today; from its subtitle descended the name for it."
-http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=gothic
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Who read it ?:
The Gothic novel was read mostly by women between 1790 and 1820. It was a kind of literary experiment which came along with the cult of " Sensibility" which was a dominant belief system at the time. It was a word used to characterize many Romantic and Gothic novelists and poets, including Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The idea of "Sensibility" is a kind of awakening to emotion and to the non-sensible, it was an investigation of the unseen, the irrational , and of the darker side of life. Much of what made Gothic literature so popular what the fact that is dealt with sexual fantasies, and with the sublime, as well as the fantastic. Another characteristic of Gothic literarture what that it often involves ghosts, apparitions, and masochistic ideas.
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Origin of the Gothic novel:
"Although the Gothic novel influenced many of the emerging genres, like Romanticism, the outpouring of Gothic novels started to ease by 1815 and with the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 ,the genre began to fade. The Gothic novel had come full circle, from rebellion to the Age of Reasons order, to its encompassing and incorporation of Reason as derived from terror. The influence of the Gothic novel is felt today in the portrayal of the alluring antagonist, whose evil characteristics appeal to ones sense of awe, or the melodramatic aspects of romance, or more specifically in the Gothic motif of a persecuted maiden forced apart from a true love."
Effects of the Gothic novel on Romantic writers:
" The development of the Gothic Novel from the melancholy overtures of sentimental literature to the rise of the sublime in the graveyard poets had a profound impact on the budding Romantic movement from Wordsworth to Shelley. The astounding features and use of the sublime and the overt use of the supernatural, profoundly influenced the style and material of the emerging romantics. Gothic Novels such as The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury by Thomas Leland, The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story by Clara Reeve and Vathek: An Arabian Tale by William Beckford led Coleridge to write a Gothic drama, Shelley to write two Gothic Novels and Byron to write Manfred."
-http://members.aol.com/iamudolpho/radcliffe.html
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