The play of absurdity and horror interrogates the narrative forms that structure fantasies and have real effects. Threatened by imminent death at the hands of her husband, a spectral and knightly figure rides to her rescue: the romantic hero is her mother. Further explorations through the Marquis’s precipitously situated castle lead to Radcliffean terrors in dark vaults, amid macabre instruments. She turns out to have been a relation of Dracula. In echoes of Rebecca, the heroine discovers letters of the Marquis’s first wife. ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), like the other stories in the collection of the same name, plays with the ways fairytales, legends and Gothic fictions construct identities, fantasies, fears and desires, particularly in terms of female sexuality and desire: a young female speaker casts herself as a Gothic heroine on her marriage to an aristocratic libertine and voluptuary in the Sadeian mould. Her Heroes and Villains (1969) uses the future to reflect on distinctions between civilisation and barbarity. Angela Carter’s fiction, self-consciously mixing different forms, including fairytale, legend, science fiction and Gothic, shows the interplay of narratives shaping reality and identity, particularly in relation to the production of meanings for sexuality. The stories of Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants(1969), mixing fragments of myth, fairytale and everyday realism, expose the violence and the violent structures of fantasy that are inscribed in and between the different narratives composing a culture, an uncanny narrative shadow that subverts distinctions between fictional forms and the narratives shaping reality, family and identity. Part of the challenge to modernity’s assumptions, meanings, exclusions and suppressions has emerged in fictions that juxtapose, and thereby reorganise, narrative styles and relations. Perceived as a condensation of grand narratives, the legitimacy, universality and unity of modernity is put in question. The twentieth century’s escalating anxiety regarding modernity as a combination of civilisation, progress and rationality has become focused on the way that social, historical and individual formations are bound up with the organising effects of narratives. The hybrid mixing of forms and narratives has uncanny effects, effects which make narrative play and ambivalence another figure of horror, another duplicitous object to be expelled from proper orders of consciousness and representation. Exacerbated rather than resolved by the artificial assemblages of Gothic forms, the excess contaminates all distinctions in the way it highlights the function of forms and conventions in the everyday as well as fictional world. Producing powerful emotions rather than aesthetic judgments, effects on audiences and readers rather than instructions for them, narrative forms and devices spill over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres. The uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form, and affects all categories and boundaries from the generic to the social. The play of fear and laughter has been inscribed in Gothic texts since their inception, an ambivalence that disturbs critical categories that evaluate their seriousness or triviality. Through this study of more recent stories, you’ll increase your appreciation for the appeal of the Gothic genre to modern audiences.By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Septem Specifically, you’ll study twentieth-century Gothic novels by Black women writers, mystery and detective stories that apply Gothic elements, and psychological thrillers, both in novels and film. In this unit, you’ll look at how Gothic literature has evolved since it was first popularized during the Victorian Era, and more importantly, we’ll revisit how modern Gothic writers use traditional Gothic themes to challenge social justice issues. Analyze elements of Gothic literature using a sample poem and short story.Examine which literary devices Gothic writers employ to create mood.Differentiate between horror and terror as used in Gothic literature.Explore common elements and themes that define the Gothic style of writing.Recognize the historical period in which Gothic literature first flourished.Finally, we’ll analyze two examples of Gothic literature through our examination of a poem and a short story that were written in the Gothic style. It’s also critical that readers master the vocabulary of Gothic writing and learn to recognize common themes in this genre. To fully appreciate the Gothic genre, it’s important to understand its place in history and society, which then led writers to adopt this particularly gruesome style of storytelling. In this unit, we’ll explore the classic elements of Gothic literature, from the terror it induces in its characters and readers to the literary devices its writers use to create a sense of the macabre.
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