treyf 22's List: 07_Romanticism

The latest sensation to galvanise the torpid lit-hist-crit establishment is the "discovery" by market research analyst John Lauritsen that Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein …

Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Some late eighteenth-century novels quite explicitly joined the contemporary debate about the correct taste in garden design (for example, Ann Radcliffe’s and later also Jane Austen’s novels), but even where the literary texts are less clear about their authors’ aesthetic allegiances, they often use the emotional and psychological potential of landscape. This is particularly evident in some Gothic novels (of the late eighteenth century), which crucially rely on the notion of the sublime to inspire in their heroes and readers feelings of awe and terror. I will present here readings of two examples from the Gothic genre, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) in order to trace different garden concepts and their application to narrative ends.

Gothic Nightmares is arranged over eight rooms, exploring different aspects of the taste for horror and fantasy.

Poe's stories won't lead to ersatz history lessons about the Puritans or any of the moral instruction that too often accompanies the reading of literature in schools. They don't exist here, or anywhere else we could identify on a map as part of a dual language arts/social studies curriculum. Poe's fictions exist in a no-place, in the interior of his own mind. And what's in Poe's mind isn't pretty ...  Joyce Carol Oates, who is at her best when at her darkest, sums up precisely what the Gothic still means in these post-everything times:  There is a profound difference between what appears to be and what is; and if you believe otherwise, the Gothicist has a surprise for you. The strained, sunny smile of the Enlightenment — "All that is, is holy;" "Man is a rational being" — is confronted by the Gothicist, who, quite frankly, considering the history and prehistory of our species, knows better.