| |
Here I choose only to focus on a negative aspect of it. And it has to be said that Kandre herself never mentions the term postmodernism in her work.
What then, is Gothic? Gothic is a mode. It is a way of forming different cultural products. It originated from the literary Gothic which is often said to have been created in 1764 with the novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, by the English writer Horace Walpole. The term Gothic had since long been connected with the early tribes called Goths and with Gothic architecture. Now, in the 18th century, it came roughly to mean medieval, and medieval meant roughly all time before the Enlightenment, that is, before the 18th century. Gothic literature may be called a revolt against the Enlightenment's focus on reason and intellect and its repression of feeling and imagination. After Walpole's novel, Gothic literature was extremely popular for about fifty years, and thereby created a Gothic mode which shows itself in literature and in other genres, and which lives on even today, both in the form of works that are Gothic at heart, and works that contain Gothic elements.
What is characteristic of the Gothic?
During the twentieth century numerous studies of Gothic have been published. Several critics have shown that the Gothic is not basically characterized by stage props like castles, secret passageways and other elements with which it is often associated. Instead Gothic is characterized by more hidden properties. I will now shortly mention the results of three of these researchers – Robert D. Hume, David Punter and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Robert D. Hume compared Gothic literature to Romantic literature in the essay "Gothic Versus Romanticism: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel" (1969). Hume showed that Gothic and Romantic literature have important similarities as well as differences. Both react against everyday reality and conventional religious explanations of reality, but while Romanticism is a product of a faith in a higher order, Gothic
2 |
|