{"id":2937,"date":"2013-10-31T13:50:27","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T19:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/?p=2937"},"modified":"2013-10-31T13:51:37","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T19:51:37","slug":"gothic-fiction-a-halloween-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/2013\/10\/gothic-fiction-a-halloween-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Gothic Fiction: A Halloween Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Goths, as recounted by a Gothic historian named Jordanes (mid 6th Century AD), were a Teutonic-Germanic people whose original homeland was, according to this same Jordanes, in southern Sweden. At that time, this half-barbaric band was ruled by a king called Berig. It was King Berig who led his people south to the shores of the Baltic Sea, where they split up into two groups: the Ostrogoths (or Eastern Goths), and the Visigoths (Western Goths). <\/p>\n

Also according to Jordanes, the Goths reached the pinnacle of their power around the 5th Century AD, when they conquered Rome and most of Spain.<\/p>\n

The original Goths — and this is important — have no real connection with what that word eventually came to mean<\/a>. <\/p>\n

It was many centuries later, you see, that a certain non-classical<\/em> style of architecture emerged. Because this style of architecture wasn’t classical, it was pejoratively termed Gothic, which meant “barbaric.”<\/p>\n

Gothic literature came about centuries after this and is so called because a great number of these novels are set in Gothic monasteries and Gothic abbeys. <\/p>\n

That is how the genre of Gothic literature came to be. <\/p>\n

Setting is the crucial component to Gothic fiction. As Ann Blaisde Tracy wrote in her 1981 book The Gothic Novel,<\/em><\/a> this literature depicts “a fallen world,” a world of ruin and desuetude, dilapidation and disrepair, death, decay — a vital and thriving world no more. <\/p>\n

The English author Horace Walpole is generally credited with writing the first Gothic novel, and that novel, written in 1764, is called The Castle of Otranto.<\/a><\/em> <\/p>\n

Though she didn’t originate Gothic literate, the enigmatic Anne Radcliffe (1764 \u2013 1823) is undoubtedly that genre’s greatest early popularizer, and her Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolopho<\/em> was immediately parodied by the likes of Jane Austin and Thomas Love Peacock, among others. <\/p>\n

The early Gothic novels are, however, diffuse and stylistically difficult to our modern-day eyes and ears, the pace often bogging down in its baroque prose. Among the best of the early Gothic novels is Melmoth The Wanderer<\/a><\/em>, by Charles Robert Maturin (whom Honor\u00e9 de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and Lord Byron<\/a> all admired for his rather Byronic book).<\/p>\n

Yet for all its difficulty now, Gothic literature employed wildly intriguing plot devices which at the time were quite new — secret closets, mysterious manuscripts, ghostly abbeys, unspeakable deeds — so that at its best, there is an undeniable sense of strangeness and fascination that pervades Gothic literature. That is the reason some of the world’s greatest writers<\/a> have used Gothic literature as a model for their own non-Gothic novels. <\/p>\n

Happy Halloween.
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The Goths, as recounted by a Gothic historian named Jordanes (mid 6th Century AD), were a Teutonic-Germanic people whose original homeland was, according to this same Jordanes, in southern Sweden. At that time, this half-barbaric band was ruled by a king called Berig. It was King Berig who led his people south to the shores … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Gothic Fiction: A Halloween Post”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[2034],"tags":[2316,2031,2317,2033,2653,108,2318,2319,2037,2038,2039,2043],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2937"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}