Though it had its roots in the 19th century, in the Gothic genre and in the works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, the Southern Gothic movement developed in the early 20th century and reached its peak toward the middle of the century. So is it any wonder that we'll find lots of grotesqueness and violence in Southern Gothic literature? And the institution of slavery, which was the bedrock of Southern society for hundreds of years before the war, was even more grotesque. The war itself, of course, was a pretty grotesque experience. Southern Gothic, the literature that developed as a result of this questioning, raises issues like: Why is violence such a huge part of Southern culture? How did the South's history of slavery and racial oppression warp Southern society? Why did the South have such a hard time picking itself up after its defeat in the war? The Civil War forced Southern writers-many of whom were born in the aftermath of the war-to really think about what it meant to be Southern. The Civil War, which brought an end to slavery in the South, left behind it a society that was devastated, economically and socially, by defeat. This lit is not for the squeamish.īut Southern Gothic literature is full of doom and gloom for a reason: it totally developed in the wake of the Civil War (1861-1865). That's right: we're talking about Southern Gothic literature, where we'll find a healthy dose of the grotesque, a hefty dash of violence, and as much disintegration and decay as the gothiest goth could want. A time of revolution and reason, madness and sanity, the 1750s through the 1850s provided the stuff that both dreams and nightmares were made of.Southern-gothic-kafka-and-moby-dick-moby-dick-what-is-southern-gothic. In its attention to the dark side of human nature and the chaos of irrationality, the Gothic provides for contemporary readers some insight into the social and intellectual climate of the time in which the literature was produced. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ongoing fascination with horror, terror, the supernatural, vampires, werewolves, and other things that go bump in the night evidences the power the Gothic continues to exert. Hyde in the nineteenth century demonstrates both the transformation and the influence of the Gothic. Certainly, any close examination of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. There are those such as David Punter in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day and Fred Botting in Gothic who follow the transitions and transformations of the Gothic through the twentieth century. While it may be comparatively easy to date the beginning of the Gothic movement, it is much harder to identify its close, if indeed the movement did come to a close at all. The Castle of Otranto was soon followed by William Beckford's Vathek (1786) Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1797) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Walpole's novel was wildly popular, and his novel introduced most of the stock conventions of the genre: an intricate plot stock characters subterranean labyrinths ruined castles and supernatural occurrences. Finally, the Graveyard School of poetry, so called because of the attention poets gave to ruins, graveyards, death, and human mortality, flourished in the mid-eighteenth century and provided a thematic and literary context for the Gothic. In addition, Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, offered a philosophical foundation. First, Walpole tapped a growing fascination with all things medieval and medieval romance provided a generic framework for his novel. Although Horace Walpole is credited with producing the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, his work was built on a foundation of several elements. Gothic literature, a movement that focused on ruin, decay, death, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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