Gothic Fiction Definitions

The Sublime

A technique concerned with extreme environments and the vulnerability of individual forces beyond rational understanding or control. These extreme environments are constructed to thrill the audience with awe and terror, heightening their engagement with the text. Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance employs this technique through her construction of the environment, ensuring that elements of obscurity lead to terror and anxiety within her characters and the reader themselves.

The Found Manuscript

A narrative device where the text is presented as a found document — a diary, letter, or ancient text now translated — to create a sense of authenticity and distance between the reader and the events described. Horace Walpole employed this technique in his novel Castle of Otranto (1764) in order to distance his authorship from the narrative and establish a sense of authenticity. This way, he was able to entice readers, who were used to the realist genre established in the Enlightenment period, into reading Gothic fiction.

The ‘Gothic Double’

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) employs the _____ throughout its narrative. The technique explores the dual nature of humanity and late-Victorian ideas about the brain as a ‘double organ’ — specifically referencing how the left and right hemispheres could function independently with the left as logical and the right as emotional. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the technique is employed in order to solicit an uncanny feeling in the reader, collapsing into terror as the intelligent, modern Dr. Jekyll regresses to the sadistic, primitive Mr. Hyde.

Epistolary

The ____ form is a novel written as a series of letters or journal entries between characters. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Harker’s journal entries are used to ground the reader in a sublime and gothic landscape. Additionally, multiple diary entries, letters, and newspaper clippings provide the reader with a full picture of the narrative, allowing them to trace each characters individual experience and motives throughout the narrative. Moreover, the collaborative nature of the narrative helps reinforce the idea that Dracula can only be defeated through a team effort.

Female Gothic

Catholicism and Gothic Horror

Enlightenment vs. Gothic