Gothic Timeline:
Early-Gothic
1757 – Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
1764 – Horace Walpole Castle of Otranto
1760s de Sade Justine
High Gothic: 1790s
1789 French Revolution
Terror: “expands the soul and wakens the faculties to a higher degree of life” (Ann Radcliffe).
Had a political significance i.e. French revolution saw violence and challenged to social structure.
Fear/ anxiety/ death/terror/ threats to familiar.
Activates the mind and the imagination allowing it to overcome and even transcend its fears and
doubts, the subject can move from passivity to activity
Seen as female fiction
1794 Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe
Horror: “freezes and annihilates the senses” (Ann Radcliffe).
freezes human faculties rendering the mind passive and immobilises the body
seen as masculine fiction
1796 The Monk Matthew Lewis
Gothic Romanticism: 1780-1830s
Wider literary movement was Romanticism 1780s-1830s. Romanticism was the antithesis of
Enlightenment (i.e., Alexander Pope). Gothic wild and untamed, reaction against what had come
before, obscure and death and unknown. It disrupted and disturbed conventional social limits and
notions of interiority and individuality.
1792 Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the rights of Woman
1790s Natural philosophy – new scientific discoveries i.e. Galvanism
1807 Abolition of slavery
1810 Percy Shelley St Irvyne
1816 year without a summer (dark, mysteries)
1818 Frankenstein (appears in the Romantic period)
1818 Northanger Abbey Jane Austen (parody of the gothic – direct parody of Udolpho)
Homely/Victorian Gothic: 1850s
Well established gothic tropes, gothic becoming more psychological and domestic (more everyday
life, more relatable and familiar, more in present rather than past, close rather than isolated)
Heimlich (uncanny Freud 1919): what is both familiar and concealed. Unheimlich is something that
should have remained a secret but has been revealed. Uncanny disruptions of the boundaries
between inside and outside, reality and delusion, propriety and corruption.
MORE PSYCHOLOGICAL, what is truly a threat and what is imagination drawn from terror?
Early-Gothic
1757 – Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
1764 – Horace Walpole Castle of Otranto
1760s de Sade Justine
High Gothic: 1790s
1789 French Revolution
Terror: “expands the soul and wakens the faculties to a higher degree of life” (Ann Radcliffe).
Had a political significance i.e. French revolution saw violence and challenged to social structure.
Fear/ anxiety/ death/terror/ threats to familiar.
Activates the mind and the imagination allowing it to overcome and even transcend its fears and
doubts, the subject can move from passivity to activity
Seen as female fiction
1794 Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe
Horror: “freezes and annihilates the senses” (Ann Radcliffe).
freezes human faculties rendering the mind passive and immobilises the body
seen as masculine fiction
1796 The Monk Matthew Lewis
Gothic Romanticism: 1780-1830s
Wider literary movement was Romanticism 1780s-1830s. Romanticism was the antithesis of
Enlightenment (i.e., Alexander Pope). Gothic wild and untamed, reaction against what had come
before, obscure and death and unknown. It disrupted and disturbed conventional social limits and
notions of interiority and individuality.
1792 Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the rights of Woman
1790s Natural philosophy – new scientific discoveries i.e. Galvanism
1807 Abolition of slavery
1810 Percy Shelley St Irvyne
1816 year without a summer (dark, mysteries)
1818 Frankenstein (appears in the Romantic period)
1818 Northanger Abbey Jane Austen (parody of the gothic – direct parody of Udolpho)
Homely/Victorian Gothic: 1850s
Well established gothic tropes, gothic becoming more psychological and domestic (more everyday
life, more relatable and familiar, more in present rather than past, close rather than isolated)
Heimlich (uncanny Freud 1919): what is both familiar and concealed. Unheimlich is something that
should have remained a secret but has been revealed. Uncanny disruptions of the boundaries
between inside and outside, reality and delusion, propriety and corruption.
MORE PSYCHOLOGICAL, what is truly a threat and what is imagination drawn from terror?
