Southern Gothic Literature in “The Cask of Amontillado” A sub-genre of the “18th and early 19th Century Gothic fiction, Southern Gothic Literature spawned in the “mid-20th Century” (Weinauer, Ellen). Southern Gothic Literature is used to characterize the grotesques, in which doom and gloom are displayed. This is a method often utilized to represent strangeness as well as the untraditional. As an “artistic device” characterizing the grotesque allows writers to “expose, highlight, or conceal” the writers “individual apprehensions” (Agata). Southern Gothic Literature also implements fantastic incidents to create a scene that produces a “vivid emotional response” in the reader ("Southern gothic.").
Characteristics of the Gothic include: death and decay, haunted homes/castles, family curses, madness, powerful love/romance, ghosts, and vampires. The genre is said to have become popular in the late 18th century with the publication of Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto in
This subgenre of Romantic Literature uses emotion as a technique to create metaphorical gender coding. By presenting overflowing emotions as a living or animated experience, characters in a Gothic work are given an additional layer of traits. According to Nicola Trott, the sublime is associated with masculinity by providing massive strength and size that induces terror. Sublimity creates terror through obscurity and uncertainty of potentially, irrationally terrible situations, such as murder or rape. Terror being gendered as feminine, allows Gothic works such as the The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis to complicate the gender and identity of his characters with the aforementioned
The Early Gothic The word “gothic” existed long before it become as a specified literary genre. The origin of Gothic literature is traced back to the various aspects, the history, culture, and tradition. The gothic elements were popular in the folktales such as bridegroom, cannibal, demon lover…etc. 19 The gothic roots belong to the medieval romance. If gothic genre is featured by its elements, then, gothic could be traced back to the old legends of chivalry, which embody stories set in an atmosphere of fantasy and enchantment, and deal with traditional heroes encounter monsters and beasts for the sake of fame and glory such as “Beowulf”; an epic which involves struggles with monsters as Grendel and his mother, and supernatural creatures as the
Terror, mystery, paranormal activity, doom and death were the main features of gothic novels during the era of gothic romanticism. Gothic novels and poems were given their own genre mainly because they include extreme emotional content and intensely dark themes. The natural settings were castles and monasteries which are typical forms of gothic literature. By 1840 the gothic genre had played itself out and this was partly due to writers who were developing the
In Gothic fiction we find different kinds of women, which embody the views of society towards women in the late nineteenth-century in England and Ireland. Thus we find strong, innocent and pure women like in Stoker’s Dracula, but also dangerous and powerful ones as we can see in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”. However, we also could talk about some novels in which the role of women has disappeared completely, as we can appreciate in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of women in these texts, paying special attention to Stoker’s novel, and to draw an overview of how they were represented in the society of the nineteenth-century. Freeman claims in his essay “E.
Craziness and metamorphosis in the gothic literarure is a reaction to romanticism. It refers to horror and terror; to all the things that are fantastic, magical or wild and can even become nightmarish! We can asked ourselves how craziness and metamorphosis are an integral part of the Gothic literature. Among all the writers who write novel or short story with the gothic genre, I have selected the 5th chapter of Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley that we are going to develop in the one hand and on the other hand an excerpt of the Rime of The Ancient Mariner, written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Firstly, the 5th chapter of Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley, in 1818.
The Gothic could mean a specific style of craftsmanship, be it as books, compositions, or structural engineering; it could signify "medieval" or "tactless." It could even allude to a certain kind of music and its fans. What it initially implied, obviously, is "of, identifying with, or taking after the Goths, their development, or their dialect" ("gothic"). The Gothic is, then, a kind of impersonation medievalism. It was propelled in the later eighteenth century.
Bhimani 1 Outline Prescribed Question: How does the text conform to, or deviate from, the conventions of a particular genre, and for what purpose? Text: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Thesis: In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne effectively conforms to the conventions of the gothic genre for the purpose of characterizing the Puritan society as oppressive, portraying the hypocrisy found within Puritan society and highlighting the consequences for not confessing sin. Point #1: Hawthorne effectively establishes a dark and gloomy atmosphere that adopts the conventions pertaining to the gothic genre by highlighting the oppressive nature of the Puritan society. • Use of dark imagery, and prison as a symbol of sin. • Juxtaposition
Interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Critical Readings in Literature o.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Margarete Rubik Matthias Mittendorfer a1301135@univie.ac.at Matr. No 1301135 BA A033612 SS 2015 Characterization In Frankenstein, three main characters can be discerned, Frankenstein, the monster, and Robert Walton, Frankenstein’s friend. The following three subchapters will analyse them more closely. Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein grew up in Geneva. His parents wanted him to study in Germany, which eventually decided his fate.