Gothic Literature

Themes:

  • Horror vs terror

  • The other - anything different from normal, perceived as a threat

  • Supernatural

  • Good v evil, morality vs sin

  • The uncanny - strange, eerie or mysterious, something nearly normal but not quite

  • The sublime - a sense of awe, astonishment and being overwhelmed

  • Madness and obsession

  • Opposition - direct contrasts like sanity vs insanity, wild vs civilised, dark vs light

  • Obscurity - being kept in the dark about something

  • Transgression - going against cultural, moral, or religious rules and expectations

  • The revenant - the past coming back to warn/haunt us

  • Doppelgangers - doubles, mirrors, alter egos often revealing an evil side to a character

  • Liminal - being on a threshold or boundary, e.g. between life and death, human and monster

  • Abhuman - something not quite human, a bit monstrous

  • Corruption, aristocracy and wealth

  • Exploring contemporary anxieties about society

Gothic Archetypes:

  • Femme fatale

  • Damsel in Distress

  • Byronic Hero

  • The Madwoman in the Attic

  • The Mother Figure

Settings:

  • Isolated house

  • Castle

  • Dense forest

  • Graveyard

  • Wild moorland

  • Laboratory/madhouse

  • Foreign countries

  • Cities - urban gothic

  • Abbeys/monasteries

  • Dungeons/prisons

Language:

  • Allegories

  • Allusions

  • Anachronism

  • Anthropomorphism

  • Euphemism

  • Hyperbole

  • Imagery

  • Irony

  • Juxtaposition

  • Metaphor/simile

  • Pathetic fallacy

Structure:

  • Flashbacks

  • Foreshadowing

  • Narrative

  • Sentence structure

  • Shifts in perspective

Narrative:

  • Epistolary narrative - diary entries, journals, newspapers, logs, lab reports, letters - multiple perspectives, creates authenticity making it feel more real therefore more scary, narrative gaps

  • 1st person narrative - heightens emotional experience and involves the audience in the story, creates narrative gaps

  • Unreliable narrator - creates narrative gaps

  • 3rd person - omniscient narrator - creates fear and unease

  • The immediate past vs retrospective narrative