The arguments of a critic like David Punter, in his important The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day ( 1980), base themselves on an astute (though inevitably hindsighted) claim that what we may call the Gothic exudes, manifests, grounds, displaces, and even glories in a range of cultural anxieties (and angers) characteristic of the closing years of the eighteenth century.
But although critics and readers readily identify these romances as Gothics, it cannot be argued that this mass of tales necessarily revealed their authors' conscious understanding of what might be joining them together, even though it is clear in retrospect that deep affinities linked these myriad tales.Īs with most genres, several things can be said: (1) no one tale will fit perfectly any structural definition (such as Gothic SF) (2) genres (like the Gothic, or its even more artefactual offspring Gothic SF) are normally defined most clearly in retrospect (3) almost every story written makes some use of what, in this encyclopedia, is described as an Equipoisal manipulation of more than one genre at the same time, though "equipoise" is normally used here to describe works of the past several decades where that mixing of genres seems to be a conscious strategy (4) any heuristic use of generic definitions, though necessary to any understanding of Fantastika in general, should be embarked upon with a due respect for the profoundly slippery relationship of any tale to any theory. Gothic novels in imitation of Walpole's ghostly tale became quite common as the century drew to a close, a flood of titles that did not begin to taper off until 1820 or later indeed their popularity was closely allied to the growth of Romantic literature generally. Although the Middle Ages had for much of the eighteenth century been thought of as barbaric, a nostalgia had now developed for the romantic splendours of an idealized Middle Ages that never existed. As in architecture, the word originally referred to a medieval style.
The term "Gothic" entered the English language as a descriptive term for a particular kind of story with the publication of The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story ( 1764) by Horace Walpole (1717-1797).
In current usage a "Gothic" is a romantic novel with a strong element of the mysterious or the supernatural which usually features the persecution of a woman in an isolated locale but this restricted and specialized use of the word, and the marketing category associated with it, have little to do with most sf.
0 kommentar(er)
