![]() Contemporary technology and science are set alongside ancient backdrops, and this strange pairing helps create the pervasive sense of uncanniness and estrangement that the Gothic is known for. As such, it often takes place during moments of historical transition, from the end of the medieval era to the beginnings of industrialization. Gothic fiction is rooted in blending the old with the new. It draws its name and aesthetic inspiration from the Gothic architectural style of the Middle Ages - crumbling castles, isolated aristocratic estates, and spaces of decrepitude are familiar settings within the genre. The Gothic is characterized by its darkly picturesque scenery and its eerie stories of the macabre. It’s a genre that places strong emphasis on intense emotion, pairing terror with pleasure, death with romance. Read on as we trace the history of Gothic literature and introduce ten essential reads that have haunted us for centuries.Įmerging in Europe in the 18th century, Gothic literature grew out of the Romantic literary movement. Here’s our guide to the gloomiest and most brooding of genres. Its tales shock you out of your everyday experiences - but they’re so uncannily enthralling you may well wish to remain in their realms of fright forever. Haunted houses, dark romances, shadowy corridors, windswept moors… Gothic literature has everything you could ever want in a tale of terror. The phantom’s powers are illusional and create the effect of supernatural forces.A Guide to Gothic Literature: The Top 10 Books You Have to Read The phantom’s lair and the Opera House is considered the ancient castle, making it gothic. The dreary music fills the scene with gloom, and an overall spooky message is drawn from it. In the Phantom of the Opera, several elements of gothic literature are displayed. These specific events that Poe portrays successfully puts a dark spooky vibe into the reader’s mind, convincing that darker forces are present and may come to haunt you. By the end of the poem, he calls the raven a prophet of evil, showing that the bird represents a supernatural force by showing up to the character’s window. ![]() Poe adds another layer of spook by introducing a character that is going through mental and physical torture. Later it becomes even more gothic, “Back then into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning” (Wiggins 314). It starts out in a very remote setting, which shows a mysterious vibe by placing it during midnight. ![]() Poe’s the Raven demonstrates many elements of gothic literature because the whole aura of the poem is dedicated to bringing a remote, fearful, and overall dark message to the reader. It successfully showed a dark side to the thinking and workings of the mind of people. These events demonstrate the horror, and anomalous things that only the possesed could perform. He then admits to his friend that he buried his sister alive, and she came back from the dead to take Usher with her. On that night, all the sounds and events from the story could be heard within the mansion. The resolution to the story describes catastrophic supernatural events, because on one night Usher couldn’t sleep, his friend reads a story to help calm him. When the narrator goes into find his friend in terrible mental state, fear of his own sickness, his sister’s sickness, and his belief that his mansion has supernatural powers over him. The feeling of gloom and mystery is successfully transmitted from the narrator to the reader through the spooky description of the large deserted looking castle of Usher. The narrator describes his first glimpse of the House of Usher, “I say insufferable for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible, I looked upon the scene before me” (Wiggins 293-294). Within the opening of the story, the single element of gloom is implanted into the reader. To many, this short story is considered the epitome of Gothic literature. Gothic novels feature places like mysterious and gloomy castles, where horrifying, supernatural events take place.” (Wiggins R27) “Gothic refers to the use of primitive, medieval, wild, or mysterious elements in literature.
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