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The 20th Century brought with it the rise of cinema and other media were Gothic sensibilities can manifest themselves beyond literature. What was a new perspective for me was also the Gothic’s influence and/or presence in modernist works by T.S. The book is also very good at explaining how, later in the 19th Century and in the first decades of the 20th, the Gothic was “diffused” into a number of other literary genres, including the sensation and crime novels. However, Botting provides a chapter on the transformation of the Gothic by American authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville. Some books about the subject restrict themselves to the “English Gothic”. However, space is given to relatively lesser-known purveyors of the Gothic including Regina Maria Roche and Sophia Lee. In the subsequent chapters, all the usual suspects are covered – Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew “Monk” Lewis, William Beckford. Once I settled in and got used to it, I found much to enjoy and learn in this book.īotting starts his story with the Graveyard Poets of the early 18th Century who, with their images of death and night, were the precursors of the Gothic authors who would emerge later in the century. Perhaps for this reason, I initially thought the style rather heavy-going. It seems to be intended primarily for undergraduate students, whereas I read it as a general, non-academic reader with a strong interest in the subject.
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Lloyd-Smith here defines the gothic as a "reactionary form" that "explores chaos and wrongdoing in a movement toward the ultimate restitution of order and convention" (5).Ĭhapter 1, "What is American Gothic," is then followed by two brief chapters consisting of a timeline of the growth and development of the American Gothic and a chapter entitled "How to Read American Gothic." The timeline includes not only the dates of publication for American gothic works, but.This is a sound and comprehensive overview of the Gothic genre. After a brief two-page introduction that foregrounds the importance of repetition to the genre, both in the sense of later authors working within an established generic tradition and in the sense of the return of the repressed, the book begins with a seven-page overview of the American gothic that introduces general aspects of gothic literature, such as its emphasis on the sublime, the distinction between terror and horror (which is poorly explained), and its focus on extreme emotional states, as well as specifically American cultural anxieties that influenced the development of the American gothic including the frontier experience, the legacy of Puritanism, anxieties about radical democracy, and issues of racial difference. Alan Lloyd-Smith, who is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of East Anglia and who is the author of Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa's Face (Macmillan 1989) and co-editor with Victor Sage of Gothick: Origins and Innovations (Editions Costerus-Rodopi 1994), is an established scholar of the American gothic and a good choice to author the text.Īmerican Gothic Fiction more or less follows the series template outlined above. (The other two currently out are on Native American Literatures and Irish Fiction, with forthcoming titles on Fantasy, Horror, Crime Fiction, and Science Fiction.) These relatively short texts (exclusive of annotated bibliography, glossary, and index, American Gothic Fiction clocks in around 160 pages) all more or less follow the same nine-part template: a broad definition of the genre, a timeline of its historical development, critical concerns to bear in mind while reading, detailed readings of several key texts, in-depth analysis of major themes and issues, "signposts" for future study, a summary of significant critical works, a glossary, and an annotated reading list of additional critical sources. $21.95.Īmerican Gothic Fiction: An Introduction is one of the first three entries in Continuum's "Studies in Literary Genre" series. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction.