French and German Gothic

Abstract

Literary genres do not emerge overnight, nor do they arise in cultural isolation. This is especially true of the Gothic, which not only underwent an initial period of gestation, development and decline (broadly speaking, from the publication of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to some moment after Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer of 1820) but also, from the very outset, borrowed liberally from a vast range of sources, foreign and domestic, literary, aesthetic, and scientific. In light of the burgeoning academic interest in the Gothic in Britain and the Americas over the last decades of the twentieth century, it is easy to forget that the English Gothic genre was by no means the only example of a popular aesthetic of horror in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Indeed, in France a tradition of sentimental adventure stories, stories which generally contained more than the occasional macabre frisson , had existed since the 1730s (and been equally popular elsewhere, particularly in Britain); while in Germany, at almost exactly the same moment as the vogue for the Gothic reached its apogee in Britain, the reading public devoured a succession of novels and tales featuring knights, robbers, and ghosts (thus giving rise to a tripartite genre generally thought of as the Ritter -, Räuber -, and Schauerroman ). At some moment in the late eighteenth century, moreover, under the impact of translated English and German works, the French sentimental adventure story transmuted itself into yet another distinct genre, termed the roman noir , which appropriated genre markers from translated foreign literature while generally obeying local norms with regard to narrative structure and ideological content.

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