![]() ![]() Emily’s romance with the dashing Valancourt is frustrated by Montoni and others. Aubert, a young French woman who is orphaned after the death of her father.Įmily suffers imprisonment in the castle Udolpho at the hands of Signor Montoni, an Italian brigand who has married her aunt and guardian Madame Cheron. there is a chiaroscuro : a contrast between light and darkness.įor example, The Mysteries of Udolpho is a novel set in 1584 in southern France and northern Italy which focuses on the plight of Emily St.gloomy and large elements belong to the sublime,.the frail, young and fragile heroine usually falls in love with a nice guy,.there is a contrast between the sublime and the beautiful,.The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg.Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe.Gothic novels met a real success as it was a very feminine genre : women were writing, reading and had access to culture. It was first written in French and inspired by The Arabian Nights. William Beckford published Vathek in 1782. It can be considered the first Gothic novel. His book is divided into five chapters, like the five acts of a play. Horace Walpole, nephew of a former MP and himself a rich and noble MP, was inspired by Shakespeare’s plays (especially monsters) and wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764). It is also related to primitivism as neoclassicism expressed harmony in proportions (beauty) while the revival of the Gothic was in relation with the sublime, based on pre-christian religions, legends and superstitions and the Middle Ages. There is a dialectic like Eros (love and pleasure) and Thanatos (pain and death) : these two elements, both opposed and complementary, structured the mentalities and the mental productions of the 19th century. It is rather masculine, inhuman because too vast, excessive and powerful for man, based on pain. the Sublime is great, rugged, straight and angular, dark and massive. It is something rather feminine, with human proportions, based on pleasure.Ģ. Beauty is small, smooth, not angular but curved, clear, light and delicate, with harmony in proportions. The Sublime is the concept developed by Edmund Burke in On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) which is based on two principles:ġ. The setting could typically be a dark castle or church at night… 1. It is based on the bizarre, the macabre and the supernatural, and it very often deals with aberrant psychological states (terror, fear, anxiety). The Gothic is the ancestor of the modern horror stories. ![]() It is a specific type of writing, obeying a number of rules, or recognizable through a number of themes or structural elements like suspense, plot, or characters. The Gothic and the Fantastic are two literary genres both related and different.Ī genre can characterize many types of literature such as poetry, drama, or the novel. ![]()
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