What is the Gothic era of literature?
Gothic literature is a genre that emerged as one of the eeriest forms of Dark Romanticism in the late 1700s, a literary genre that emerged as a part of the larger Romanticism movement. Dark Romanticism is characterized by expressions of terror, gruesome narratives, supernatural elements, and dark, picturesque scenery.
What are the key features of Gothic literature?
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 1764.
How do you describe gothic literature?
In the most general terms, ​Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread.
What is the purpose of gothic literature?
The purpose of Gothic literature was and still is to entertain and to inspire improvement of oneself through imagination. Some characteristics of dark romanticism are desolate location, ghost or spirit, use of symbols, and death by disease or madness.
Why is Gothic literature called Gothic?
Called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, such novels commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors.
What is the purpose of Gothic literature?
What are three characteristics of a protagonist in Gothic literature?
The Gothic Protagonist
- Some degree of tragic stature.
- Of high social rank.
- Somehow foreshadowed by doom.
- A tendency to be influenced by past events.
- Sharply contrasting qualities within the character.
- The possession of considerable powers.
- A striking physical presence.
- A strongly sexual element.
What was the purpose of Gothic literature?
What is the goal of Gothic literature?
Gothic literature thus focussed on the supernatural, dreams, visions, omens and madness – things which had not yet been explained. mwestwood, M.A. One cultural function of the gothic narrative is for exploration of the human soul. To illustrate this function, one may examine the works of many a gothic author.
Why was Gothic literature created?
Gothic fiction began in the United Kingdom with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. It depended for its effect on the pleasing terror it induced in the reader, a new extension of literary pleasures that was essentially Romantic.
Why is the Gothic genre so important?
Gothicism was important because it showed that people needed a vehicle for exploring the dark and irrational—the world of murder, imprisonment, supernatural occurrences, death, illness, and abuse of power. It is also important because its main vehicle was the relatively new form of the novel.