Coumba Diawara Coffeehouse #3

It is assumed that gothic fiction began as a lurid offshoot from a dominant tradition of largely realist and morally respectable fiction. (Page 3)

Strict interpreters of the Gothic as a genre would perhaps agree with Maurice Lévy’s insistence that the true period of Gothic, and its cultural, aesthetic, religious, and political background, was from about 1764 to 1824, the period of the first Gothic Revival, and the culture of Georgian England.° Lévy acknowledges however that the term has now become of much broader application and popular understanding, and has been used to describe texts ranging from Wuthering Heights (1847) to William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Page 4)

The Gothic deals in transgressions and negativity, perhaps in reaction against the optimistic rationalism of its founding era, which allowed for a rethinking of the prohibitions and sanctions that had previously seemed divinely ordained but now appeared to be simply social agreements in the interest of progress and civic stability. (Page 5)

Freethinking characters appear frequently in the Gothic, and they are generally up to no good, disbelieving in the significance of virginity, for example (while obsessively eager to deflower those who maintain it), and proclaiming their own superiority and inherent freedom as rational beings above the shibboleths of convention and religious faith. Their prey are innocents who put their trust in the benevolence and right thinking of others, and it is not difficult to see in these contrasts that the Gothic is in essence a reactionary form, like the detective novel, one that explores chaos and wrongdoing in a movement toward the ultimate restitution of order and convention. (Page 5)

Among the extremes and taboos that the Gothic explores are religious profanities, demonism, occultism, necromancy, and incest. This can be interpreted as a dark side of Enlightenment freethinking or the persistence of an increasingly excluded occultist tradition in western culture, one which paradoxically insisted on an acknowledgment of the continuing existence of magic, religious, and demonic forces within a more and more secular society. (Page 6)