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Gothic literature was a vogue in Britain in the 1790s. Its connection with Gothic art seems remote, except that it is often set in crumbling, ancient castles. In essence, Gothic novels and poems subjected their heroes (and especially their heroines) to jeopardy in dark, old houses and other sinister locations. Grimness of the physical environment was matched by darkness and panic in the emotions. The eroticism of dread has never been so consistently or deliberately exploited. The style leaned heavily on earlier folk tales, and was a harbinger of Romanticism. Later writers who employed it, notably Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson, took it to heights of horror undreamed of by its original exploiters ‘Monk’ Lewis, Mrs Radcliffe and Horace Walpole. The Gothic influence is evident throughout literature written in English, from Dickens, the Brontë sisters and H.G. Wells to such modern masters of the macabre as James Herbert and Stephen King. All modern fantasy and sf has learned from it—and from there its influence has spread to such authors as Angela Carter, Bernice Rubens, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson, and to many German and South American exponents of magic realism. KMcL |
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