Gothic Book Research

Gothic Horror: A guide for students and readers - Clive Bloom (second edition)

Introduction: The Nature of Gothic and Horror Fiction (pages 1-3)
In 1997 Bram Stroker's Dracula celebrated its 100th year. It's one of the greatest horror tales ever told and more importantly one of the most important pieces of literature ever written. Since it was first published, it has never been out of print. This was the start of the vampire industry that spans film, radio, tv, books, comics and merchandise. The style within which Stroker wrote represented the old gothic rather than the more modern attitude towards the fiction of the supernatural that was in place by the mid nineteenth century. Dracula is both a synthesis and nostalgic revival of gothic themes.

"When this is considered it becomes clear that the term 'gothic' covers formal problems of style, and content, as well as a history of popular reading, all of which have evolved across two centries. Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (the first gothic novel) bears a little or as much relationship to Edgar Allan Poe's tales as they do to Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Although the term 'gothic genre' may be singular its incarnations are diverse and often retain only the slightest genuflection toward an orginal 'core' or formal set of generic properties. Futhermore, the nature of the gothic is so disparate that it can include (because of formal similaries) works of fiction that contain neither supernatural nor horror elements but which do contain similar attitudes to setting, atmosphere or style.

Gothicism may be viewed (without much exaggeration) as one pole of the fictional imagination the ther of which (seen as its opposite, but actually a continuum of effects) is the domestic or contemporary fiction (often middle-class) sensibilty. The continuum that links the gothic to 'domestic novel' is marked by the fact that however arcane or historic the gothic setting it is always linked to the desire of contemporary readers. At once escapist and xonformist, the gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction: erotic, violent, perverse, bizarre and obsessionally connected with contemporary fears.

Horror is the usual but not necessarily the main ingredient of gothic fiction and most popular gothic fiction is determined in its plotting by the need for horror and sensation, It was gothicism, with its formality, codification, ritualistic elements and artifice (its very origins as an aesthetic outlook and literary condition first and foremost) that transformed the old folk tale of terror into the modern horror story."

"The new gothic is the horror of the mind isolated with itself"



Gothic - Fred Botting

Introduction: Gothic Excess and Transgression (pages 1-10)

"Gothic signifies a writing of excess. It appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality. It shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities od Victorian realism and decadence. Gothic atmospheres - gloomy and mysterious - have repeatedly signalled emotions of terror and laughter. In the twentieth century, in diverse and ambiguous ways, Gothic figures have continued to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values. Gothic condenses the many perceived threats to these values, threats associated with supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, mental disitegration and spiritual corruption. If not a purely negative term, Gothic writing remains fascinated by objects and practices that are constructed as negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic, In a world, since the eighteenth century, has become increasingly secular, the absence of a fixed religious framework as well as changing social and political conditions has meant that Gothic writing, and its reception, has undergone significant transformations. Gothic excesses, none the less, the fascination with transgression and the anxiety over cultural limits and boundaries, continue to produce ambivalent emotions and meanings in their tales of darkness, desire and power.

"While terror and horror are often used synonymously, distinctions can be made between the them as countervailing aspects of Gothic's emotional ambivalence. If terror leads to an imaginative expansion of one's sense of self, horror describes the movement of contraction and recoil. Like the dilation of the pupil in movements of excitement and fear, terror marks the uplifting thrill where horror distinguishes a contraction at the imminence and unavoidability of the threat. Terror expels after horror glimpses invasion, reconstituating the boundaries that horror has seen dissolve."



The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear - Dani Cavallaro

Introduction
"The gothic vision investigates narratives of darkness - the textual constellations of the phenomenon of fear - that represent violent desecrations of common sense and logic. Terror and horror, the concepts around which assessments of dark fiction have traditionally revolved, are not antithetical, as it has often been contended, but complementary. Terror has conventionally been linked to fear triggered by indeterminate agents, and horror to fear occasioned by visible gore. Although feelings of disorientation and anxiety indubitably alter according to the degree to which their causes may be related to material or incorporeal occurances, these do not constitute fixed and self-contained categories for they incessantly collude and metamorphose into each other as fear's interdependant affects."