Unit II Gothic Literature

Unit II Gothic Literature

1. Emerged in England in the late 18th century.

   • Adopted the aesthetics of
     • Horror literature.
     • Horror movies.
     • Post-punk.

2. The stories told by traditional Gothic literature

   • used to take place in medieval castles and monasteries.
     • Dracula.
       • Author: Bram Stoker.
       • Harker travels to Castle Dracula, where he is kidnapped so that Dracula can feed on his blood, he can escape and arrives with his fiancee, Mina.
         • Mina's friend, Lucy, begins to have a strange disease, she dies but they observe that she has two points on her neck, so it is concluded that she was bitten by a vampire.
           • To end this, you have to drive a wooden stake into the heart, cut off the head and fill it with garlic, in the end they succeed with all the boxes.

3. Cemeteries, crypts and desolate wastelands

   • are other settings where many Gothic tales take place.
     • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
       • Author: Washington Irving.
       • A Hessian mercenary was killed during the Battle of White Plains.
         • He was beheaded by a cannonball, which shattered his head on the battlefield.
           • His body was buried in the graveyard of the Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, every All Souls Night he rises like a furious ghost in search of his lost head.

4. Characters

   • All kinds of villains and evil beings appear
     • Vampires, ghosts, demons and different kinds of monsters.
       • Frankenstein.
         • Author: Mary Shelley.
         • Victor creates experiments to revive the dead, in one of those experiments he creates a monster. However, he is rejected by society.
           • The monster proposes to make a deal with Victor, but he doesn't do his part, so the monster wants revenge.
             • Victor eventually dies and the monster disappears into the sea.

5. It exaggerates the characters and the situations

   • It moves in a supernatural framework that facilitates terror, mystery and horror.
     • The Scarlet Letter.
       • Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne.
       • Hester Prynne, a woman who has a child outside of her marriage because she believes that her husband is dead even though he, Roger, is still alive.
         • She uses a letter A as a symbol of her adultery.
           • Roger seeks revenge on the lover, Arthur, in the end he dies and trusts him.
             • After her death she is buried next to Arthur, and their joint tombstone is inscribed with "On a field, sable, the letter a, gules."

6. The Gothic space was later modified to accommodate the special concerns of Victorian readers

   • Turning kidnapping into mental and social, in addition to physical detention
     • With characters trapped by obsessed minds, cities, families, and social structures.
       • The Tell-Tale Heart.
         • Author: Edgar Allan Poe.
         • A man who claims not to be crazy becomes obsessed with observing and killing an old man.
           • He ends up confessing the crime to the police who go to the scene because of his nerves and fears.

Images and files in the map