Gothic terminology

Question 1

Convention

Answer 1

A feature of a work that defines its genre

Question 2

Trope

Answer 2

The use of figurative language or a literary device for a favoured effect

Question 3

Setting

Answer 3

The location and time frame in which the action of the narrative takes pplace

Question 4

Genre

Answer 4

A distinctive type or category of literary composition

Question 5

Style

Answer 5

How a work is presented through the writer’s voice

Question 6

Liminality

Answer 6

Someone or something being on the boundary between two things, often two extremes

Question 7

Blurred boundaries

Answer 7

Where a boundary becomes more broad so there is more ambiguity

Question 8

Identity

Answer 8

The things that make a character or object distinctive to dictate their actions

Question 9

Intertextuality

Answer 9

The shaping of a text’s meaning by another text to lead to a richer reading experience which invitess new interpretations

Question 10

Character representation

Answer 10

How the narrator describes a character to filter the reader’s understanding of the character

Question 11

Gender representation

Answer 11

How the writer and the characters define themselves and how society evaluates them

Question 12

Class distinction

Answer 12

A characteristic that is observed to differ based on social class

Question 12

Class distinction

Answer 12

A characteristic that is observed to differ based on social class

Question 13

Heirarchy

Answer 13

A system in which people are ranked according to relative status or authority

Question 14

Feminist literature

Answer 14

Literature that deliberately transgresses traditional boundaries, in order to understand how gender has been constructed and represented through language

Question 15

Marxist literature

Answer 15

Reading the text as an expression of contemporary class struggles relating to social and political conditions at the time

Question 16

Female Gothic

Answer 16

The use of certain coded expressions to describe anxieties over domestic entrapment and female sexuality by female Gothic writers

Question 17

Fin de siècle Gothic

Answer 17

Gothic literature of the last three decades if the 19th Century where there is a pervading sense of unease and instability

Question 18

18th Century Gothic

Answer 18

Gothic fiction published in the 18th Century which evoked the sentimental and supernatural qualities of medieval romance

Question 19

Terror vs horror

Answer 19

Terror feels dread or apprehension at the possibility of something; horror is the shock and repulsion of seeing something

Question 20

The sublime

Answer 20

The worshipping of aesthetic and intellectual greatness that excites the reader beyond one’s normal experience

Question 21

The Uncanny

Answer 21

The psychological experience of a familiar thing or event being encountered in an unsettling, eerie or taboo context

Question 22

Doppelganger

Answer 22

The literal or symbolic double set in opposition to one of the chaaracters which allows for an explanatation of human duality

Question 23

the Gothic

Answer 23

Works that depict strange and mysterious events using tropes

Question 24

Agency

Answer 24

The ability or choice to take action

Question 25

Dichotomy

Answer 25

A difference between completely opposite concepts or objects

Question 26

Duality

Answer 26

The state of combining two things at once

Question 27

the Other

Answer 27

Something or someone cast into the state of being different or seperate

Question 28

Trauma

Answer 28

Severe or emotional lasting shock and pain which a psychological impact

Question 29

Objectification

Answer 29

The process of treatingg a person like a thing without feelings, opinions or rights

Question 30

the Abject

Answer 30

Something that disturbs the self, by provoking disgust, fear, loathing or repulsion

Question 31

Orientalism

Answer 31

Western constructions of ‘the Orient’ as exotic, seductive and violent

Question 32

Incarceration

Answer 32

The state of being confined and imprisoned