Gothic Unseen Contextual Texts

Question 1

Pre Gothic

Answer 1

1720s-1763
Burke and the theory of the Sublime 1757
Graveyard poetry

Question 2

Early Gothic 1764-1788 (TEXTS)

Answer 2

The Castle of Otranto 1764 (Horace Warpole) - Family secrets, haunted castles and the intrusion of the supernatural (moving portrait).
Vathek 1786 (William Beckford) - rich, eerie and decadent imagery, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and fascination with Orientalism.

Question 3

Early Gothic (THEMES)

Answer 3

Sentimentalism and medievalism emerging as a way of rebelling against Enlightenment rationality.
Move away from realism towards a more pleasurable form of pain/terror.

Question 4

High Gothic 1789-1813 (TEXTS)

Answer 4

The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794 (Anne Radcliffe) - persecuted pure heroine, brooding villain.
The Monk 1796 (MG Lewis) - hypocrisy of religious institutions, women as victims, repression and forbidden desire.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 1798 (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) - nature v men, Romanticism, supernatural curses (cursed to wonder alone), storytelling and moral obligation.

Question 5

High Gothic (THEMES)

Answer 5

1789-1813
Female gothic literature - Anne Radcliffe and the Minerva Press.
Radcliffe defines terror as something that “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”. Horror, in contrast, “freezes and nearly annihilates them” with its unambiguous displays of atrocity.

Question 6

Late Gothic 1814-1836

Answer 6

Northanger Abbey 1818 (Jane Austen) - naive and imaginative young heroine, marriage as a moral imperative.
Frankenstein 1818 (Mary Shelley) - deranged scientist, epistolary novel, usurping God’s role and overstrained ambition.
The Vampyre 1819 (John Polidori) - slow uncovering of a villain, vampires as members of the aristocracy.

Question 7

Late Gothic (THEMES)

Answer 7

1814-1836
Romantic Gothic; focus on the individual (Byronic Hero), nature as its own character, interaction between faith in an ultimate order and the limitations of man.

Question 8

Victorian Gothic 1837-1900 (TEXTS)

Answer 8

Jane Eyre 1947 (Charlotte Bronte) - pure woman resistant to corruption, the madwoman in the attic.
Wuthering Heights 1853 (Emily Bronte) - brooding protagonist, representing settings in a character.
Carmilla 1871 (Sheridan le Fanu) - women usurping social constraints of men, homoerotic undertones.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) - villainy in everyone, dangers of impulse.
The Yellow Wallpaper 1892 (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) - madness, domestic fear, psychological terror, male rationality.
Dracula 1897 (Bram Stoker).

Question 9

Victorian Gothic (THEMES)

Answer 9

1837-1900
Authorial comment, modern/industrial setting, gothic as a reflection of societal fears (e.g. reverse imperialism)