Gothic fiction
The weird fiction (English Gothic fiction ) or the gothic novel (English Gothic novel ) is a literary genre of fantasy, which originated in the middle of the 18th century in England and experienced its heyday in the early 19th century.
The English Gothic novel
With The Castle of Otranto Horace Walpole wrote in 1764 the first gothic novel and established a new genre, which enjoyed the second half of the 18th century enormous popularity. Richard Hurd described the new direction in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance as " Gothic Romance ", in which he found something that was " the point of view of a genius and the purpose of poetry in particularly appropriate." He underscored his praise with an example of the architecture:
The rise of the weird fiction is closely related to an extension of the concept of aesthetics, once discovered since Joseph Addison's Spectator essay on "Imagination" the various forms of nature and its effect on people, on the other hand the dangerous and sinister sides. The enhanced aesthetics, therefore, no longer refers solely to the Arcadian landscape, but also on the Dark and the sublime.
The theoretical pioneering work for this paradigm shift had to take place primarily Edmund Burke with his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ( 1747 ). For the weird fiction the dark and sublime is also crucial in the sense that the concept of the people no longer represents only the side of reason, the balanced social behavior and one that they can assume aesthetic expression in the foreground, but also the irrational, dark and destructive traits of the ego, so that a previously unknown landscape of the soul in the tension between man, nature and culture results, as it were an artistic and literary exemplification of the " dialectic of enlightenment " avant la lettre. Known representatives of Anglo-Saxon literature showers are ( in chronological order with their major works ):
- Clara Reeve ( The Old English Baron, 1778)
- William Beckford ( Vathek, 1786)
- Ann Radcliffe ( The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794, and The Italian, 1797)
- William Godwin ( Caleb Williams, 1794)
- Matthew Gregory Lewis ( The Monk, 1796)
- Percy Bysshe Shelley ( Zastrozzi, 1801)
- Mary Shelley ( Frankenstein, 1818)
- Charles Robert Maturin ( Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820 )
- James Hogg ( The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1824)
Around 1825, the heyday of the Gothic Novel was over. Many motifs of the Gothic novel but were taken from the literature of the Romantic period. It was the horror romance or romance blacks. In contrast, authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins were at the beginning of the development of the detective novel, the heavily relies in its manifestation as Mystery Thriller on motifs of the Gothic novel. In a third direction, the development moved to the modern horror literature with representatives such as Howard Phillips Lovecraft or Stephen King.