The Gothic Novel

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Download:	48
Data:	25.06.2001
Numero di pagine:	6
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

THE GOTHIC NOVEL
THE AGE OF TRANSITION
• Between Classicism and Romanticism
• Early romanticism
Pre-romanticism
Classicism
Age of reason
Imitation of the classics
Elaboration
Social writer
Reason and balance
Established rules
Routine life and realism
Domestic pleasures
The known and conventional
Objectivity
Classical Rome and Greece
Wit and common sense
Romanticism
Age of sensitivity
Originality
Spontaneity
Individual genius
Feeling and emotion
Free imagination
Exotic places
Search for sensation
The super-natural
Subjective feeling for nature
The Middle-Ages
Pathos
==> A COMMON DISTASTE for the FORMALITY
ELEGANCE
ARTIFICIALITY of the Augustans
NEW AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THEORIES
YOUNG
==> GENIUS = a divine gift, a product of originality and inspiration
==> The genius flourished in primitive ages when people were in contact with NATURE, the spontaneous expression of feeling
==> The most natural were the most IGNORANT (they don’t know so they are happy):
the savage, the peasant and the children
ROUSSEAU
==> Cult of CHILDHOOD
==> Cult of the NOBLE SAVAGE: man is naturally good and the institutions make him bad, so there must be a return to nature in which the primitives lived happy and innocent
==> Cult of DEMOCRACY: he’s interested in the poor
==> Cult of IMAGINATION: it is an escape from reality
==> Cult of NATURE: it is a refuge from a corrupted society
==> Cult of MELANCHOLY, because happiness comes from emotions and imagination, while reality leads to depression, melancholy and detection
In this period there different schools of poets:
ELEGIAC POETS
==> They find relief in nature and in the life of country people
==> Thomson, Collins
==> Reflective moods
==> Melancholy favoured long solitary walks in the country
==> Interest in ruins, deserted places, night scenes, tombs, stormy land places
==> All these things reminded man of his mortality
GRAVEYARD POETS
==> Churchyards C macabre
loneliness of the grave

Meditation on death and transitory of life
==> Young : “Night thoughts”
Blair: “The grave”
Gray: “Elegy written in a country church yard”
==> They inspired Pindemonte’s “Cimiteri” and Foscolo’s “Sepolcri”
INTEREST IN NORDIC AND CELTIC CULTURE AND IN THE MIDDLE AGES
==> This developed the vogue for LITERARY DISCOVERIES
==> Thomas Chatterton: “The Rowley poems” – 1777
==> He poisoned himself at 17 because ha hadn’t wrote them but he found them and no-one believed him H a MYTH of the young genius unappreciated by the world
a SYMBOL of the artist as an outcast
OSSIANIC POETRY
==> James Mac Pherson : “Fragments of ancient poetry collected in the highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or erse language”
It became an instant success so he wrote the poems I Fingal - 1762
Temora - 1763
collected in the “Works of Ossian”- 1765 ” he’s a 3rd century Gaelic warrior and bard
He’s compared to Homer H natural genius
sons of nature
singers from a lost age of ideals
Other poets are in no school:
W.COWPER
==> A romantic figure of the insane poet
==> Happiness of rural life
R.BURNS
==> A poet of rural life
==> The national poet of Scotland
W.BLAKE
==> A seer, a prophet, a visionary
THE TRAVELLER
In this period there is a vogue for the GRAND TOUR, indispensable for any fashionable young man. He had to know the FASHIONABLE SITES of the continent, especially Italy.
We can say that there is a travelling mania.
THE IDEAL TRAVELLER by GIBBON
==> Know languages
==> Have an ear for music
==> Have an eye for artistic and natural beauty
==> Be able to fix enchanting scenes and sights in sketches, drawing or watercolours.
We can distinguish:
==> Early in the century he’s attracted by monumental ruins, churches and palaces.
==> Later he has the cult of untouched nature (taste for winding mountain roads, turbulent rivers, nocturnal landscapes, steep cliffs)
HISTORY OF THE PERIOD
==> GEORGE III1760-1820
==> AMERICAN REVOLUTION: 4 July 1776, Declaration of Independence
==> FRENCH REVOLUTION and NAPOLEONIC WARS until his final defeat in Waterloo, 1815
==> INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, which took from an agricultural to a manufacturing country (about 1760 - 1830/1850)
It also took to scientific progress that destroyed the old system: mechanization, with steam-powered machines (Watt, 1769), began the Industrial Era.
The innovations caused less need of workers unemployment poverty and crime slums with appalling hygienic conditions that caused illnesses and a high death rate.
For the workers there were inhuman conditions.
EDMUND BURKE
1757: “A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful”
==> BEAUTIFUL B classical harmony, balance, regularity in form
it corresponds to classical or baroque art
it is founded on pleasure
==> SUBLIME strength, irregularity, fear, pain, terror, violence
it ancitipates Freud
whatever is visibly terrible or great in dimension
g for example: silence, obscurity, ocean, Gothic buildings, medieval castles or mysterious events
there is the idea of terrifying beauty, linked with the sense of danger, terror, impossible, competition, admiration, reverence, respect.
, two conditions make things even more terrible: OBSCURITY
MYSTERY
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
==> A revolt against the REALISM of the novelists of the Augustan age
==> Aimed at THRILLING THE READER not at amusing or educating him
==> Owed much to the fashion for ANCIENT RUINS and WILD SCENERY
==> Introduced into England by Italian printers I Monsù Desiderio
Agostino Tassi
Salvator Rosa

they painted rugged mountains, wild woods, roaring streams, ruins, romantic highwaymen
THE SCHOOL OF TERROR
1764: year of publication of Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto”. It started a mode, called “The school of terror”, popular till the 1820’s.
==> Ann Radcliffe: “The mysteries of Udolpho” 1794 1 rational explanation at the end
“The Italian” 1794
==> M.G.Lewis : “The Monk” 1796 violence, erotism, witchcraft
==> Mary Shelley: “Frankenstein” 1818
ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS
==> Complicated plots set in strange catholic and unfamiliar countries or in an imaginary past time, like Middle Ages
==> Terrifying descriptions d extraordinary situations
supernatural events
monsters, ghosts, vampires
==> The facts take place in T prisons
convents or abbeys
haunted castles
any type of Gothic building
==> There must be T secret passages
dark corridors
dreadful dungeons
==> Settings must be surrounded by S thick forests
impenetrable woods
==> Other characteristics are O ghostly moonlight
thunderstorms
natural phenomena
night-darkness
wind
==> Sense of mystery, awe, suspense
CHARACTERS
==> They are STEREOTYPES
==> The hero T satanic, cruel, cynical, the typical villain
victim of negative impulses
handsome, mysterious, melancholic, dark-haired
irresistible to women
have a secret in the past (mostly incest)
the wanderer, the vampire, the outcast, the overreacher

one ho seeks forbidden knowledge, like Marlowe’s “Dr.Faustus”,
a model for the Byronic hero
==> The heroine T beautiful, shy, helpless
a myth of persecuted maiden

a model was Richardson’s “Pamela” and “Clarissa”
WHAT DOES GOTHIC MEAN?
==> MEDIEVAL: related to the style of the Middle Ages (12th-14th century) in architecture
==> IRREGULAR and BARBAROUS
==> WILD and SUPERNATURAL, that means mysterious and fearful
BURKE’S THEORIES
Following Burke’s theories of the horrid and sublime the gothic novelists discovered
==> The charm of HORROR
==> The power of SENSATION connected with the grotesque
the supernatural
The sublime is the essential element of the Gothic novel, horror films and Stephen King’s books.
HORACE WALPOLE
Fond of the MIDDLE AGES, he tried to revive the atmosphere of the time first through ARCHITECTURE (his house was a little gothic castle, that he described as a “sublime dream”) and then through LITERATURE.
In 1764 he published “The castle of Otranto”, a blend of , love stories
persecution
supernatural
For the great use of the supernatural he was inspired by a Venetian architect, PIRANESI, especially in “The carceri”, a collection of paints; they are described in this way: “gloomy dungeons surmounted by dark arches, crossed by impossible bridges and stairs leading nowhere, all filled with instruments of torture and death.”

1