Theorizing the Gothic

Abstract

The sustained analytical teaching of “Gothic” fiction (now including film) has developed slowly and relatively recently, to say the least. For most of the twentieth century, despite its continuous production of Gothic tales, plays, and motion pictures, Gothic fiction-making has only rarely been deemed worthy of serious scholarly and student attention. One reason, of course, starting in the late eighteenth century soon after Gothic fiction began, has been the critical consignment of it to the “low culture” of “pulp” literature, which has long bred “an inherent distaste” among most academics “for a genre at once too visceral ( and [supposedly] too ephemeral) and too popular.” 1 This literary class system, too, has only been reinforced by the growing dominance of the so-called “New Criticism” from the 1930s to the mid-1960s. This mode of analysis based on an explicit theory of literary language, though never rigidly unified across its practitioners, commonly values the “organic” text: a tightly woven interaction among dense symbols whose conflicting overtones, while clearly in play, can be worked into a unity built out of the contradictions, a concordia discours peculiar to the truly “literary,” that establishes the best literature as dense high art within clear genres designed primarily for a coherent aesthetic response. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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