I’m back with another installment of my Gothic Settings series! In case you missed it, last month I decided to start exploring the particular environments and locales that repeatedly appear as the backdrops to Gothic stories by examining the most classic and iconic of settings: the castle. While the ancient and exotic aura of the castle captured the Gothic imagination from the genre’s start, this week I want to shift gears entirely to a setting closer to home for British writers: the moors.
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.”
“Back to School” doesn’t look quite the same this year. Whether you’re attending virtually, in person, hybrid, or still waiting on your school administrators to figure that out, things are sure to be rather chaotic as we try to navigate this new reality of educating during a pandemic. I figured I would try to reintroduce a little normalcy to this fall season by bringing back my old tradition of putting together a mini-syllabus of classic Gothic works for the start of the school year. In my initial Back to School Reading List, I highlighted a few Gothic novels you’re most likely to come across in class. I followed that post up with a Short Story Edition, Drama Edition, and Poetry Edition of the reading list. Today, I’m returning to novels to spotlight a few more classics that didn’t make it into the initial post: Continue reading Back to School Reading List, Part 2
With Valentine’s Day around the corner, we’ve all got a bit of romance on the mind. And what could be more romantic than an entire genre that was originally called “Gothic Romance”? Of course, the term “romance” has meant different things over the course of the genre’s history, and each iteration of the Gothic utilizes romantic elements in different ways. Let’s take a brief look at the role romance has played in Gothic fiction.
Publishing works either anonymously or under a pseudonym has been a tradition in the Gothic literary genre since its very creation. Such deception might be done for a variety of reasons. Early works of Gothic literature often tried to pass themselves off as something older—long-buried ancient manuscripts newly discovered and translated by an enterprising soul—to both increase their mystique and shield the author’s reputation from critiques of this untested new style. As Gothic novels became increasingly popular with female authors, many of them adopted male pen names or left their name off entirely to avoid the stigma of their gender. Today, pseudonyms give authors the opportunity to depart from their usual genres, to step away from their existing fame, or simply to add to the fun. Continue reading Anonymity and Pseudonyms in Gothic Literature
