You’ll often hear the term “Gothic romance” tossed about, sometimes in wildly different contexts. Are we talking about mid-century pulp novels whose covers feature women in flowing gowns fleeing from brooding men and looming castles? Or are we talking about The Castle of Otranto—a novel which hardly contains anything that modern readers would recognize as romance. To understand the many meanings of a phrase like “Gothic romance,” we have to dive into the history of what the words “romance” and “romantic” have meant in a literary context over the years.
Tag: Gothic vocab
Gothic Vocab: Liminal
Last year I started a series of posts highlighting vocab terms that will help you better understand the Gothic. So far, we’ve covered the sublime, the uncanny, and the grotesque. Today, I want to turn our attention to an adjective that is frequently employed to describe people, places, and situations in Gothic literature: “liminal.”
Gothic Vocab: The Grotesque
Perhaps more so than the other vocabulary words we’ve discussed thus far (the sublime and the uncanny), “grotesque” is a term you’re just as likely to hear thrown about in casual conversation as in academic discourse on Gothic literature. We might use it to describe anything that’s bizarre, incongruous, unnatural, or gross. But where does it come from, and what does it mean in a literary context? Much like the word “Gothic” itself, grotesque has a convoluted and roundabout history that covers a wide range of meanings and takes us back to ancient times. Continue reading Gothic Vocab: The Grotesque
Gothic Vocab: The Uncanny
This week I want to continue my series on Gothic vocabulary. You may remember back in November, I wrote about another vocab term—the sublime—which was central to the Romantic era’s conception of the Gothic. This time I want to discuss a twentieth-century term that to this day still crops up frequently in any discussion of the Gothic or of horror more broadly: the uncanny.
Gothic Vocab: The Sublime
The “sublime” is a word you’ll hear tossed around a lot as you study Gothic literature, and even sometimes within the texts themselves. But what exactly does it mean? I’ll do my best to give a simple introduction to this rather complex term in this post, which will be the first in a series on important vocabulary words that will enhance your understanding of the Gothic.