Fin de Siècle Gothic Flashcards
What were the main preoccupations?
Morality and duality of self, women’s roles in patriarchal society, changing social ideas and values, the fear of scientific progress, degeneration
What are the key texts?
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula, Bram Stoker
What new genre began in this period?
Science fiction (excluding Frankenstein)
What was Lovecraft’s ‘cosmic horror’ and what did it do?
Melded terror and horror together. Cosmic horror describes a profound experience of dread in the face of a vast, apparently meaningless universe, similar to Shelley’s use of the sublime, driven by scientific development that stressed the material origins of mankind in impersonal evolutionary forces.
What other form of gothic was established?
The psychological gothic, in which supernatural occurrences were able to be interpreted as both magical and madness.
Who’s work should you reference for psychological gothic?
M R James
