Coffeehouse #3 by Tom Tracy

Some points that stood out to me in Allen Lloyd-Smith’s “American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction”

1. “From the earliest period of American Gothicism – and some critics have seen almost the whole of American writing as a Gothic literature – differences in American circumstances led American Gothicists in other directions…” (pg. 4)
2. “Among these American pressures were the frontier experience, with its inherent solitude and potential violence; the Puritan inheritance; fear of European subversion and anxieties about popular democracy which was then a new experiment; the relative absence of developed ‘society;’ and very significantly, racial issues concerning both slavery and the Native Americans.” (pg. 4)
3. “Hallmarks of the Gothic include a pushing toward extremes and excess, and that, of course, implies an investigation of limits. In exploring extremes…Gothic tends to reinforce, if only in a novel’s final pages, culturally prescribed doctrines of morality and propriety.” (pg. 5)
4. “Among the extremes and taboos that Gothic explores…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.” (pg. 6)
5. “Gothic interest in extreme states and actions can also be seen to correlate with widespread social anxieties and fears.” (pg. 6)