Gothic Era | bigboringbookblog

Gothic Literature

The Idea Behind Gothic Literature

Gothic Literature focused on the idea of decay, ruin, chaos, death, and terror
Privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
The Graveyard School of poetry (named after the attention poets gave to ruins, graveyards, death, and human mortality) flourished in the mid-eighteenth century and provided a thematic and literary context for the Gothic.

Historical Context

the French Revolution, and its effect on notions of class and identity;
Darwinism and his threat to the established parameters of religious thought;
the Industrial Revolution, with its ambivalence towards technology as both exciting and dangerous, and its profound effect on social class with the possibility for acquired rather than inherited wealth

Elements of Gothic Literature

Gloomy, decaying setting (haunted houses or castles with secret passages, trapdoors, and other mysterious architecture)
Supernatural beings or monsters (ghosts, vampires, zombies, giants)
Curses or prophecies
Damsels in distress
Heroes
Romance
Intense emotions

Representative Authors

William Beckford (1760–1844)
Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810)
Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818)
Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)
Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

Novels from this Movement