Gothic unseen passage definitions

Terror (Radcliffe)

'expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life'

Horror (Radcliffe)

contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates

Why does Radcliffe privilege terror over horror?

Its obscurity and indeterminacy activates the imagination, enabling the subject to 'move from a state of passivity to activity', 'to distinguish and overcome the threat it manifests'

The sublime (with Burke)

a union of grandeur and obscurity, 'tranquility tinged with terror', thus inducing a mixture of pleasure and pain

What does the sublime do? (Botting)

It is…

It lacks…and instead feeds…

It upsets…as well as…

From which the Gothic villain emerges as…

exciting rather than informing, proportioned contours, uncultivated appetites, domestic sensibilities, sexual propriety, an awful spectre of complete social disintegeration in which virtue cedes to vice, reason to desire, law to tyranny

The Gothic heroine (Ellen Moers)

'A defenceless victim…whose sufferings are the source of her erotic fascination'

The Gothic heroine (Winter, Miller)

'Women who are at all self-assertive…are tortured or killed'

‘a poisonous pedagogy’

The uncanny (Freud's definition)

'something familiar and old-established in the mind which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.'

The Gothic is… (Botting)

'a writing of excess'

Gothic figures… (Botting, Enlightenment tension)

'shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values'

Gothic (Carter)

‘singular moral function - of provoking unease’

Gothic (Bowen)

‘a world of doubt’