Gothic critics

Anne Radcliffe

‘Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate; confusion by blurring one image into another, leaves only a chaos in which the mind’

Fred Botting

‘Terror enables escape…rendering the mind passive and immobilising the body’

Fred Botting (2)

‘By touching on political subject women writers “unsex” themselves: they enter with impurity and impropriety a male domain of writing instead of remaining within domesticated limits of fiction’

Fred Bottling (3)

‘loss of reason, sobriety, decency and morality is displayed in full horror’

Aldana Reyes

‘Terror was soul-enriching and subtle, and horror, claustrophobic and visceral’

Aldana Reyes (2)

‘Terror perceived as ‘purer and somehow more genuine form of the Gothic’

Victoria Leslie

‘The New Woman wanted to work and take an active part in politics and social change’

Neil Bowen

‘What had been horrific for one generation, quickly became comic for the next’

Horner and Zlosnik

‘Gothic is a disfigured mixing of genres’

Anne Radcliffe (2)

‘Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them’

E. Ledoux

‘Distressed female heroines are imprisoned in the domestic sphere and threatened with extortion, rape and forced marriage’

R. Kidd

‘Tension is provided by the possible violation of innocence’

M.C Mellor

Role of gothic victim "- “Penetrated by a sexually attractive villian’

C. Bacchilega - TBC

‘Hetero-sexual sadomasochism in the context of a socially exploitative and repressive society’

D.B Morris

'“The eighteenth-century sublime always implied the threat of lost control”

“Gothic sublimity — by releasing into fiction images and desires long suppressed, deeply hidden, forced into silence — greatly intensifies the dangers of an uncontrollable release from restraint”

Chaplin

‘In many Gothic stories the mother is a destructive character’

David Punter

‘Gothic was the archaic, the pagan, that which was prior to, or resisted the establishment of civilised values and a well regulated society’

Laura Kranzler

'One of the most chilling fears that informs these stories is the threat of ancestral repetition' (e.g. in Frankenstein who fears the beginnings of a new race of monsters’

Andrew Green

‘Doors…act as a potent and threatening boundaries’