Death In Gothic Literature Essay

Life, war, death, and love are the main themes that touch the human soul and very often in literature, especially in masterpieces, we find them combined. Such kaleidoscopic pieces of literature, although fictional, empower ourselves to see life with different eyes and they plant in our brains the seeds of new attitudes and perspectives on life itself. In many cultures, mythologies and writings, death, far from being only an aspect or stage of life, is also a very important symbol. Death is illustrated different from a civilisation to another and from an author to another. Many of the religions of the world are actually based on the fascination of the humankind upon this subject. Speaking of literature, while some authors presented death as

In the modern world, when Freud and Jung came with new theories about the human mind and subconscious, explaining dreams and the human conscience, even literature itself began to be preoccupied with what are the human reactions to certain images, a reason why the horror literature is so visual and full of descriptions about images and sounds rather than feelings. Through H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and many authors that wrote horror literature, we can observe that their stories describe situations that may be associated with the primitive state, situations that bring us back on the time when religion and belief were founded based on the idea of death. It is because although we live in a modern world and we may call ourselves far more civilised than our ancestors, we still see death as a mystery which leads to many unanswered questions. Of course, there are many theories, scientifical or religious, but what is actually the question of the humankind is not where we are going after death, for we do not know what death is, but rather how does death feel. In the Peguin collection of short stories, prose poems, and poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, ”The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies”, Clark Ashton Smith affirms that death often reveals the