字典解释哥特式小说.doc

Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.
Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere.
The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations—thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such Anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic excesses such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain).
Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.
The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, monks, nuns, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, dragons, angels, fallen angels, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew and the Devil himself.
Contents
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· 1 Parody
· 2 The Female Gothic
· 3 The Romantics
· 4 Victorian Gothic
· 5 Post-Victorian legacy
· 6 Prominent examples
o 6.1 Gothic satire
· 7 See also
· 8 Notes
· 9 References
· 10 External links
[edit] Parody
The excesses, stereotypes, and frequent absurdities of the traditional Gothic made it rich territory for satire (Skarda 1986). The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic. Jane Austen's novel is valuable for including a list of early Gothic works since known as the Northanger Horrid Novels:
· The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by 'Ludwig Flammenberg' (pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert; translated by Peter Teuthold)
· Horrid Mysteries (1796) by the Marquis de Grosse (translated by P. Will)
· The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Eliza Parsons
· The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale (1796) by Eliza Parsons
· Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche
· The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath
· The Midnight Bell (1798) by Francis Lathom
These books, with their lurid titles, were once thought to be the creations of Jane Austen's imagination, though later research by Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers confirmed that they did actually exist and stimulated renewed interest in the Gothic. They are currently all being reprinted by Valancourt Press (Wright 2007: 29-32).
Another example of Gothic parody in a similar vein is The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813). Cherry Wilkinson, a fatuous female protagonist with a history of novel-reading, fancies herself as the heroine of a Gothic romance. She perceives and models reality according to the stereotypes and typical plot structures of the Gothic novel, leading to a series of absurd events culminating in catastrophe. After her downfall, her affectations and excessive imaginations become eventually subdued by the voice of reason in the form of Stuart, a paternal figure, under whose guidance the protagonist receives a sound education and correction of her misguided taste (Skarda 1986).
[edit] The Female Gothic
Characterized by its castles, dungeons, gloomy forests and hidden passages, from the Gothic novel genre emerged the Female Gothic. Guided by the works of authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, the Female Gothic permitted the introduction of feminine societal and sexual desires into Gothic texts. The Medieval society in which Gothic texts are based, granted women writers the opportunity to attribute “features of the mode [of Gothicism] as the result of the suppression of female sexuality, or else as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture.”[1]
Significantly, with the development of the Female Gothic came the literary technique of the appropriately coined term, Supernatural Explained. The Supernatural Explained is a recurring plot device in Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. The novel, published in 1791, is among Radcliffe’s earlier works. The novel sets up suspense for horrific events, which all have natural explanations.
An Eighteenth Century response to the novel from the Monthly Review reads: “We must hear no more of enchanted forests and castles, giants, dragons, walls of fire and other ‘monstrous and prodigious things;’ – yet still forests and castles remain, and it is still within the province of fiction, without overstepping the limits of nature, to make use of them for the purpose of creating surprise.” [2]
Radcliffe’s use of Supernatural Explained is characteristic of the Gothic author. The female protagonists pursued in these texts are often caught in an unfamiliar and terrifying landscape, delivering higher degrees of horror. The end result, however, is the explained supernatural rather than female terrors, such as rape, incest, ghosts or haunted castles. [3]
In Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, one may follow the female protagonist, Adeline, through the forest, hidden passages and abbey dungeons, “without exclaiming, ‘How these antique towers and vacant courts/ chill the suspended soul, till expectation wears the cast of fear!”[2]
The decision of Female Gothic writers to supplement true supernatural horrors with explained cause and effect transforms romantic plots and Gothic tales into common life and writing. Rather than establish the romantic plot in impossible events Radcliff strays away from writing “merely fables, which no stretch of fancy could realize.”[4]
English scholar Chloe Chard’s published introduction to The Romance of the Forest refers to the “promised effect of terror.” The outcome, however, “may prove less horrific than the novel has originally suggested.” Radcliffe sets up suspense throughout the course of the novel, insinuating a supernatural or superstitious cause to the mysterious and horrific occurrences of the plot. However, the suspense is relieved with the Supernatural Explained.
For example, Adeline is reading the illegible manuscripts she found in her bedchamber’s secret passage in the abbey when she hears a chilling noise from beyond her doorway. She goes to sleep unsettled, only to awake and learn that what she assumed were haunting spirits, were the domestic voices of the servant, Peter. La Motte, her caretaker in the abbey, recognizes the heights to which her imagination reached after reading the autobiographical manuscripts of a past murdered man in the abbey.
“‘I do not wonder, that after you had suffered its terrors to impress your imagination, you fancied you saw specters, and heard wondrous noises.’ La Motte said.
‘God bless you! Ma’amselle,’ said Peter.
‘I’m sorry I frightened you so last night.’
‘Frightened me,’ said Adeline; ‘how was you concerned in that?’
He then informed her, that when he thought Monsieur and Madame La Motte were asleep, he had stolen to her chamber door… that he had called several times as loudly as he dared, but receiving no answer, he believed she was asleep… This account of the voice she had heard relieved Adeline’s spirits; she was even surprised she did not know it, till remembering the perturbation of her mind for some time preceding, this surprise disappeared.”[5]
While Adeline is alone in her characteristically Gothic chamber, she detects something supernatural, or mysterious about the setting. However, the “actual sounds that she hears are accounted for by the efforts of the faithful servant to communicate with her, there is still a hint of supernatural in her dream, inspired, it would be seem, by the fact that she is on the spot of her father’s murder and that his unburied skeleton is concealed in the room next hers.”[6]
The supernatural here is indefinitely explained, but what remains is the “tendency in the human mind to reach out beyond the tangible and the visible; and it is in depicting this mood of vague and half-defined emotion that Mrs. Radcliffe excels.”[6]
Transmuting the Gothic novel into a comprehendible tale for the imaginative Eighteenth Century woman was useful for the Female Gothic writers of the time. Novels were an experience for these women who had no outlet for a thrilling excursion. Sexual encounters and superstitious fantasies were idle elements of the imagination. However, the use of Female Gothic and Supernatural Explained, are a “good example of how the formula [Gothic novel] changes to suit the interests and needs of its current readers.”
In many respects, the novel’s “current reader” of the time was the woman who “lay down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame,” [7] according to Jane Austen, author of Northanger Abbey. The Gothic novel shaped its form for female readers to “turn to Gothic romances to find support for their own mixed feelings.”[8]
Following the characteristic Gothic Bildungsroman-like plot sequence, the Female Gothic allowed its readers to graduate from “adolescence to maturity,”[9] in the face of the realized impossibilities of the supernatural. As female protagonists in novels like Adeline in The Romance of the Forest learn that their superstitious fantasies and terrors are replaced with natural cause and reasonable doubt, the reader may understand the true position of the heroine in the novel:
“The heroine possesses the romantic temperament that perceives strangeness where others see none. Her sensibility, therefore, prevents her from knowing that her true plight is her condition, the disability of being female.”[9]
The Romantics

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) has come to define Gothic fiction in the Romantic period. Frontispiece to 1831 edition shown.
Further contributions to the Gothic genre were provided in the work of the Romantic poets. Prominent examples include Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) and Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1820) which feature mysteriously fey ladies (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 33-5, 132-3). In the latter poem the names of the characters, the dream visions and the macabre physical details are influenced by the novels of premiere Gothicist Anne Radcliffe (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 132-3). Percy Bysshe Shelley's first published work was the Gothic novel Zastrozzi (1810), about an outlaw obsessed with revenge against his father and half-brother. Shelley published a second Gothic novel in 1811, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, about an alchemist who seeks to impart the secret of immortality.
The poetry, romantic adventures and character of Lord Byron, characterised by his spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' were another inspiration for the Gothic, providing the archetype of the Byronic hero. Byron features, under the codename of 'Lord Ruthven', in Lady Caroline's own Gothic novel: Glenarvon (1816).
Byron was also the host of the celebrated ghost-story competition involving himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. This occasion was productive of both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819). This latter story revives Lamb's Byronic 'Lord Ruthven', but this time as a vampire. The Vampyre has been accounted by cultural critic Christopher Frayling as one of the most influential works of fiction ever written and spawned a craze for vampire fiction and theatre (and latterly film) which has not ceased to this day. Mary Shelley's novel, though clearly influenced by the gothic tradition, is often considered the first science fiction novel, despite the omission in the novel of any scientific explanation of the monster's animation and the focus instead on the moral issues and consequences of such a creation.
A late example of traditional Gothic is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin which combines themes of Anti-Catholicism with an outcast Byronic hero (Varma 1986).
[edit] Victorian Gothic

Edgar Allan Poe was an important reinterpreter of Gothic fiction.
By the Victorian era Gothic had ceased to be the dominant genre (in fact the form's popularity as an established genre had already begun to erode with the success of the historical romance popularised by Sir Walter Scott). However, in many ways, it was now entering its most creative phase. Recently readers and critics have begun to reconsider a number of previously overlooked Penny Blood or Penny Dreadful serial fictions by such authors such as G.W.M. Reynolds who wrote a trilogy of Gothic horror novels: Faust (1846), Wagner the Wehr-wolf (1847) and The Necromancer (1857) (Baddeley 2002: 143-4). Reynolds was also responsible for The Mysteries of London which has been accorded an important place in the development of the urban as a particularly Victorian Gothic setting, an area within which interesting links can be made with established readings of the work of Dickens and others. Another famous penny dreadful of this era was the anonymously authored Varney the Vampire (1847). The formal relationship between these fictions, serialised for predominantly working class audiences, and the roughly contemporaneous sensation fictions serialised in middle class periodicals is also an area worthy of inquiry.
Influential critics, above all John Ruskin, far from denouncing mediaeval obscurantism, praised the imagination and fantasy exemplified by its gothic architecture, influencing the Pre-Raphaelites.
An important and innovative reinterpreter of the Gothic in this period was Edgar Allan Poe who believed 'that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul'. His story "