It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Gothic novel. (Discuss)
Gothic literature is a style of fiction that emphasizes the grotesque, mysterious, and desolate. It relies upon different conventions - it largely combines the real and the fabulous, it is usually sensational or supernatural. It's typical settings will include gloomy castles, oppressive ruins in wild landscapes, European countries usually under a Catholic or feudal reign. There will be a heroine of trembling sensitivy with an impetuous lover and a tyrannical older man. The style of narrative will be discontinous and convoluted. Certain topics will recur, such as deathlike states. Incest and unnatural echoes will probably feature, as well as effects of guilt and/or shame. The hero will probably come upon unintelligible writings and several matters that may be "unspeakable". Also is incest Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Strawberry Hill, an English villa in the Gothic revival style, built by seminal Gothic writer Horace Walpole The gothic novel is an English literary genre, which can be said to have been born with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. ... The Three Graces, here in a painting by Sandro Botticelli, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology. ...
Gothicliterature as a movement was a disappointment to the idealistic romantic poets for the sentimental character idealized by Ann Radcliffe could not transcend into reality.
The influence of the Gothic novel is felt today in the portrayal of the alluring antagonist, whose evil characteristics appeal to ones sense of awe, or the melodramatic aspects of romance, or more specifically in the Gothic motif of a persecuted maiden forced apart from a true love.
The development of the Gothic Novel from the melancholy overtures of sentimental literature to the rise of the sublime in the graveyard poets had a profound impact on the budding Romantic movement from Wordsworth to Shelley.
By the mid eighteenth century the cult of sensibility was taking root; the current obsession with the purity of form of the neoClassical and its association with reason gave birth to a reaction in the form of appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion and the sublime.
The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to these emotions by indicating the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations, thus the craze for building fake ruined churches on English country estates as part of landscape architecture.
Thus was born the gothic novel's association with fake documentation to increase its effect.
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