Brian Brodeur at The Hudson Review:
Much of literary culture regards the Gothic genre as an archaic embarrassment—gloomy ruins and paranormal lovers that serious practitioners have learned to dismiss. Yet such dismissals neglect a basic fact of literary history. Intimations of demonic realms and spectral forces emerged in tandem with the English novel, several early examples of which featured devil pacts, reanimation, ghost ships, and homunculi. Furthermore, neither British Romanticism nor French Symbolism would have been as consequential or interesting without Gothic writings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, one could argue that a nascent version of European Modernism emerged in the mid-1800s when Baudelaire began publishing his translations of Poe’s fiction, an enterprise foundational to the composition of Les Fleurs du mal (first published in 1857, definitive edition posthumously in 1868).
Gothic was always a risk. In the US, a country founded on Enlightenment principles of rationalism and scientific progress, it provided a nightmarish counterpoint to the American dream. An “art of exciting surprise and horror,” as Walter Scott construed the genre, Gothic was refined in the young republic when Poe fired three shots across the bow of Victorian respectability by publishing “Berenice” (1835), “Ligeia” (1838) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).
more here.
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