- Gothics representation of extreme circumstances of terror, oppression and persecution, darkness and obscurity of setting, and innocence betrayed… – pg1
- Rather than a simple matter of imitation and adaption, substituting the wilderness and the city for the subterranean rooms and corridors of the monastery, or the remote house for the castle, dark and dangerous woods for the bandit infested mountains of italy, certain unique cultural pressures led amercans to the gothic as an expression of their cery different conditions – pg2
- Strict interpreters of the Gothic as a genre would perhaps agree with Maurice Levy’s insistence that the true periodof Gothiv, and its cultrual, aesthetic, religious, and political background, was from about 1764 to 1824, the period of the first Gothic Revival and the culture of Georgian England. Levy acknowledges however that the term has now become of much broader application and popular understanding…- pg2
- Hallmarks of the Gothic include a pushing toward extremes and excess, and that, of course, implies an investigation of limits. In exploring extremes, whether of cruelty, rapacity and fear of passion and sexual degredation, the Gothic tends to reinforce, if only in a novels final pages, culturally prescribed doctrines of morality and propriety. -pg3
- Gothic interest in extreme states and actions can also be seen to correlate with widespread social anxieties and feares. Significant amoung these are fears having to do with the suppressions of past traumas and guilt, anxieties concering class and gender, fear of revolutin, worries about the developing powers of science; an increaseing suspicion that empire and colonial experience might bring home an unwanted legacy; post-Darwinian suggestions of possible regression or atavism; and displaces version of the dread occasioned by syphallis, or much later, by AIDS
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Izabella,
These are key passages. I especially liked #4 and 5.
-Prof. Scanlan