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The Castle of Otranto - Wikipedia
See if you have enough points for this item. Seminar paper from the year in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: HS Novels of the Romatic Period, 10 entries in the bibliography, language: I want to examine the features of the Gothic sublime: It marks, in a certain aspect, a turning point in literature, since it is regarded the first Gothic novel.
I will argue that the horror as developed in The Castle of Otranto is not simply based upon the appearance of ghosts and supernatural events, but rather a subtle kind of horror. Firstly, an introduction into the Gothic novel in general, its characteristic features, and the examination of the cultural background of English Gothic fiction shall give a brief overview over the topic. Secondly, I will examine the means by which Walpole evokes fear in the reader, and the effects they had.
Hans Holbein the Younger. A Very Short Introduction. Misconceptions About the Middle Ages.
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You Could Look It Up. The Alphabetizaton of the Popular Mind. Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide. An Introduction to Iconography. The Medieval Greek Romance. Language from an Historical Standpoint Lecture 1 of 6. How Soon Is Now? The Beginnings of English Law. Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. This first edition purported to be a translation based on a manuscript printed at Naples in [1] and recently rediscovered in the library of "an ancient Catholic family in the north of England".
This "ancient Catholic family" is possibly the Percy family, as Walpole would have known the Duke of Northumberland and his wife Elizabeth Percy , though this is not proven. He employed an archaic style of writing to further reinforce this. The Italian manuscript's story, it was claimed, derived from a story still older, dating back perhaps as far as the Crusades.
In the second and subsequent editions, Walpole acknowledges authorship of his work, writing: In the former all was imagination and improbability: The first edition was well received by some reviewers who understood the novel as belonging to medieval fiction, "between , the era of the First Crusade , and , the date of the last", as the first preface states; and some referred to Walpole as an "ingenious translator".
In his edition of The Castle of Otranto , Montague Summers showed that the life story of Manfred of Sicily inspired some details of the plot. The real medieval castle of Otranto was among Manfred's possessions. The Castle Of Otranto tells the story of Manfred, lord of the castle, and his family.
The book begins on the wedding-day of his sickly son Conrad and princess Isabella. Shortly before the wedding, however, Conrad is crushed to death by a gigantic helmet that falls on him from above. This inexplicable event is particularly ominous in light of an ancient prophecy, "that the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it".
Manfred, terrified that Conrad's death signals the beginning of the end for his line, resolves to avert destruction by marrying Isabella himself while divorcing his current wife Hippolita, whom he feels has failed to bear him a proper heir. However, as Manfred attempts to marry Isabella, she escapes to a church with the aid of a peasant named Theodore. Manfred orders Theodore's death while talking to the friar Jerome, who ensured Isabella's safety in the church. When Theodore removes his shirt to be killed, Jerome recognizes a marking below his shoulder and identifies Theodore as his own son.
Jerome begs for his son's life, but Manfred says Jerome must either give up the princess or his son's life. They are interrupted by a trumpet and the entrance of knights from another kingdom who want to deliver Isabella. This leads the knights and Manfred to race to find Isabella.
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Theodore, having been locked in a tower by Manfred, is freed by Manfred's daughter Matilda. He races to the underground church and finds Isabella. He hides her in a cave and blocks it to protect her from Manfred and ends up fighting one of the mysterious knights. Theodore badly wounds the knight, who turns out to be Isabella's father, Frederic. With that, they all go up to the castle to work things out. Frederic falls in love with Matilda and he and Manfred begin to make a deal about marrying each other's daughters. Manfred, suspecting that Isabella is meeting Theodore in a tryst in the church, takes a knife into the church, where Matilda is meeting Theodore.
Thinking his own daughter is Isabella, he stabs her. Jane Austen's novel is valuable for including a list of early Gothic works since known as the Northanger Horrid Novels. These books, with their lurid titles, were once thought to be the creations of Jane Austen's imagination, though later research by Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers confirmed that they did actually exist and stimulated renewed interest in the Gothic. They are currently all being reprinted. Cherry Wilkinson, a fatuous female protagonist with a history of novel-reading, fancies herself as the heroine of a Gothic romance.
She perceives and models reality according to the stereotypes and typical plot structures of the Gothic novel, leading to a series of absurd events culminating in catastrophe.
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After her downfall, her affectations and excessive imaginations become eventually subdued by the voice of reason in the form of Stuart, a paternal figure, under whose guidance the protagonist receives a sound education and correction of her misguided taste. James , Hugh Walpole , and Marjorie Bowen.
In America pulp magazines such as Weird Tales reprinted classic Gothic horror tales from the previous century, by such authors as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle , and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and printed new stories by modern authors featuring both traditional and new horrors. Lovecraft who also wrote a conspectus of the Gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature as well as developing a Mythos that would influence Gothic and contemporary horror well into the 21st century.
From these, the Gothic genre per se gave way to modern horror fiction , regarded by some literary critics as a branch of the Gothic [66] although others use the term to cover the entire genre. Gothic Romances of this description became popular during the s, s, and s, with authors such as Phyllis A. Many featured covers depicting a terror-stricken woman in diaphanous attire in front of a gloomy castle , often with a single lit window.
Gothic fiction
Many were published under the Paperback Library Gothic imprint and were marketed to a female audience. Though the authors were mostly women, some men wrote Gothic romances under female pseudonyms. Outside of imprints like Love Spell, who discontinued publishing in , very few books seem to be published using the term today. The genre also influenced American writing to create the Southern Gothic genre, which combines some Gothic sensibilities such as the grotesque with the setting and style of the Southern United States.
The Southern Ontario Gothic applies a similar sensibility to a Canadian cultural context. Farrell's novels spawned a subgenre of "Grande Dame Guignol" in the cinema, represented by such films as the film based on Farrell's novel , which starred Bette Davis versus Joan Crawford ; this subgenre of films was dubbed the " psycho-biddy " genre. Many modern writers of horror or indeed other types of fiction exhibit considerable Gothic sensibilities—examples include the works of Anne Rice , Stella Coulson , Susan Hill , Poppy Z.
Brite, Stephen King and particularly Clive Barker have focused on the surface of the body and the visuality of blood. Du Maurier's work inspired a substantial body of "female Gothics", concerning heroines alternately swooning over or being terrified by scowling Byronic men in possession of acres of prime real estate and the appertaining droit du seigneur. Educators in literary, cultural, and architectural studies appreciate the Gothic as an area that facilitates the investigation of the beginnings of scientific certainty.
As Carol Senf has stated, "the Gothic was The themes of the literary Gothic have been translated into other media. There was a notable revival in 20th-century Gothic horror films such the classic Universal monsters films of the s, Hammer Horror films, and Roger Corman 's Poe cycle. The s Gothic television series Dark Shadows borrowed liberally from the Gothic tradition and featured elements such as haunted mansions, vampires, witches, doomed romances, werewolves, obsession, and madness.
The Showtime TV series Penny Dreadful brings many classic gothic characters together in a psychological thriller that takes place in the dark corners of Victorian London debut. Black Sabbath 's debut album created a dark sound different from other bands at the time and has been called the first ever "Goth-rock" record. Lovecraft were also used among gothic rock and heavy metal bands, especially in black metal , thrash metal Metallica 's The Call of Ktulu , death metal , and gothic metal. For example, heavy metal musician King Diamond delights in telling stories full of horror, theatricality, satanism and anti-Catholicism in his compositions.
Various video games feature Gothic horror themes and plots. For example, the Castlevania series typically involves a hero of the Belmont lineage exploring a dark, old castle, fighting vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, and other Gothic monster staples, culminating in a battle against Dracula himself. Others, such as Ghosts'n Goblins feature a campier parody of Gothic fiction. It has been acclaimed as one of the best role-playing adventures of all time, and even inspired an entire fictional world of the same name. It contains sub-games, allowing you to play as a human, or as one of the inhuman creatures in the setting.
Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the Gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime , and a quest for atmosphere.
The ruins of Gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations—thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals.
In literature such Anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic institutions such as the Inquisition in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain. Just as elements of Gothic architecture were borrowed during the Gothic Revival period in architecture, ideas about the Gothic period and Gothic period architecture were often used by Gothic novelists. Architecture itself played a role in the naming of Gothic novels, with many titles referring to castles or other common Gothic buildings. This naming was followed up with many Gothic novels often set in Gothic buildings, with the action taking place in castles, abbeys, convents and monasteries, many of them in ruins, evoking "feelings of fear, surprise, confinement".
This setting of the novel, a castle or religious building, often one fallen into disrepair, was an essential element of the Gothic novel.
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Placing a story in a Gothic building served several purposes. It drew on feelings of awe, it implied the story was set in the past, it gave an impression of isolation or being cut off from the rest of the world and it drew on the religious associations of the Gothic style. This trend of using Gothic architecture began with The Castle of Otranto and was to become a major element of the genre from that point forward. Besides using Gothic architecture as a setting, with the aim of eliciting certain associations from the reader, there was an equally close association between the use of setting and the storylines of Gothic novels, with the architecture often serving as a mirror for the characters and the plot lines of the story.
This secret movement mirrors one of the plots of the story, specifically the secrets surrounding Manfred's possession of the castle and how it came into his family. In William Thomas Beckford 's The History of the Caliph Vathek , architecture was used to both illustrate certain elements of Vathek's character and also warn about the dangers of over-reaching. Vathek's hedonism and devotion to the pursuit of pleasure are reflected in the pleasure wings he adds on to his castle, each with the express purpose of satisfying a different sense.
He also builds a tall tower in order to further his quest for knowledge. This tower represents Vathek's pride and his desire for a power that is beyond the reach of humans. He is later warned that he must destroy the tower and return to Islam or else risk dire consequences. Vathek's pride wins out and, in the end, his quest for power and knowledge ends with him confined to Hell.
In the Castle of Wolfenbach the castle that Matilda seeks refuge at while on the run is believed to be haunted. Matilda discovers it is not ghosts but the Countess of Wolfenbach who lives on the upper floors and who has been forced into hiding by her husband, the Count. Matilda's discovery of the Countess and her subsequent informing others of the Countess's presence destroys the Count's secret. Shortly after Matilda meets the Countess the Castle of Wolfenbach itself is destroyed in a fire, mirroring the destruction of the Count's attempts to keep his wife a secret and how his plots throughout the story eventually lead to his own destruction.
The major part of the action in the Romance of the Forest is set in an abandoned and ruined abbey and the building itself served as a moral lesson, as well as a major setting for and mirror of the action in the novel. The setting of the action in a ruined abbey, drawing on Burke's aesthetic theory of the sublime and the beautiful established the location as a place of terror and of safety.
Burke argued the sublime was a source of awe or fear brought about by strong emotions such as terror or mental pain. On the other end of the spectrum was the beautiful, which were those things that brought pleasure and safety. Burke argued that the sublime was the more preferred to the two. Related to the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful is the idea of the picturesque , introduced by William Gilpin, which was thought to exist between the two other extremes.
The picturesque was that which continued elements of both the sublime and the beautiful and can be thought of as a natural or uncultivated beauty, such as a beautiful ruin or a partially overgrown building. In Romance of the Forest Adeline and the La Mottes live in constant fear of discovery by either the police or Adeline's father and, at times, certain characters believe the castle to be haunted. On the other hand, the abbey also serves as a comfort, as it provides shelter and safety to the characters.
Finally, it is picturesque, in that it was a ruin and serves as a combination of both the natural and the human. By setting the story in the ruined abbey, Radcliffe was able to use architecture to draw on the aesthetic theories of the time and set the tone of the story in the minds of the reader.
As with many of the buildings in Gothic novels, the abbey also has a series of tunnels. These tunnels serve as both a hiding place for the characters and as a place of secrets. This was mirrored later in the novel with Adeline hiding from the Marquis de Montalt and the secrets of the Marquis, which would eventually lead to his downfall and Adeline's salvation.
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Architecture served as an additional character in many Gothic novels, bringing with it associations to the past and to secrets and, in many cases, moving the action along and foretelling future events in the story. Characterized by its castles, dungeons, gloomy forests and hidden passages, from the Gothic novel genre emerged the Female Gothic. Female gothic differs from the male gothic through differences in narrative technique, plot, assumptions of the supernatural, and the use of terror and horror.
Female Gothic narratives focus on topics of the persecuted heroine in flight from a villainous father and in search of an absent mother, while male writers tended towards a plot of masculine transgression of social taboos. The emergence of the ghost story gave female writers something to write about besides the common marriage plot, allowing them to offer a more radical critique of male power, violence and predatory sexuality.
It has been said that medieval society, on which some Gothic texts are based, granted women writers the opportunity to attribute "features of the mode [of Gothicism] as the result of the suppression of female sexuality, or else as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture".
Significantly, with the development of the Female Gothic came the literary technique of explaining the supernatural. The Supernatural Explained — as this technique was aptly named — is a recurring plot device in Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest. The novel, published in , is among Radcliffe's earlier works. The novel sets up suspense for horrific events, which all have natural explanations. However, the omission of any possible explanation based in reality is what instills a feeling of anxiety and terror in both character and reader.
An 18th-century response to the novel from the Monthly Review reads: Radcliffe's use of Supernatural Explained is characteristic of the Gothic author. The female protagonists pursued in these texts are often caught in an unfamiliar and terrifying landscape, delivering higher degrees of terror. The end result, however, is the explained supernatural, rather than terrors familiar to women such as rape or incest, or the expected ghosts or haunted castles.
The female gothic formula is said to be "a plot that resists an unhappy or ambiguous closure and explains the supernatural". The decision of Female Gothic writers to supplement true supernatural horrors with explained cause and effect transforms romantic plots and Gothic tales into common life and writing. Rather than establish the romantic plot in impossible events Radcliffe strays away from writing "merely fables, which no stretch of fancy could realize. English scholar Chloe Chard's published introduction to The Romance of the Forest refers to the "promised effect of terror".
The outcome, however, "may prove less horrific than the novel has originally suggested". Radcliffe sets up suspense throughout the course of the novel, insinuating a supernatural or superstitious cause to the mysterious and horrific occurrences of the plot. However, the suspense is relieved with the Supernatural Explained. For example, Adeline is reading the illegible manuscripts she found in her bedchamber's secret passage in the abbey when she hears a chilling noise from beyond her doorway.
She goes to sleep unsettled, only to awake and learn that what she assumed to be haunting spirits were actually the domestic voices of the servant, Peter.
La Motte, her caretaker in the abbey, recognizes the heights to which her imagination reached after reading the autobiographical manuscripts of a past murdered man in the abbey. He then informed her, that when he thought Monsieur and Madame La Motte were asleep, he had stolen to her chamber door This account of the voice she had heard relieved Adeline's spirits; she was even surprised she did not know it, till remembering the perturbation of her mind for some time preceding, this surprise disappeared.
While Adeline is alone in her characteristically Gothic chamber, she detects something supernatural, or mysterious about the setting. However, the "actual sounds that she hears are accounted for by the efforts of the faithful servant to communicate with her, there is still a hint of supernatural in her dream, inspired, it would seem, by the fact that she is on the spot of her father's murder and that his unburied skeleton is concealed in the room next hers". The supernatural here is indefinitely explained, but what remains is the "tendency in the human mind to reach out beyond the tangible and the visible; and it is in depicting this mood of vague and half-defined emotion that Mrs.
Transmuting the Gothic novel into a comprehensible tale for the imaginative 18th-century woman was useful for the Female Gothic writers of the time. Novels were an experience for these women who had no outlet for a thrilling excursion. Sexual encounters and superstitious fantasies were idle elements of the imagination. However, the use of Female Gothic and Supernatural Explained, are a "good example of how the formula [Gothic novel] changes to suit the interests and needs of its current readers".
In many respects, the novel's "current reader" of the time was the woman who, even as she enjoyed such novels, would feel that she had to "[lay] down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame," [95] according to Jane Austen , author of Northanger Abbey. The Gothic novel shaped its form for female readers to "turn to Gothic romances to find support for their own mixed feelings".