American Gothic

LiteratureThough in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. Herman Melville,

Moby Dick

American Gothic Literature

Gothic refers to the use of medieval, wild, or mysterious elements in literature. Gothic literature features gloomy settings and horrifying events. Edgar Allan Poe is generally regarded as the American master of Gothic writing.

American Gothic

Literature

Themes•Family structure•Violence•Unreliable narrators•Transgression•Religion

American Gothic Literature

Gothic literature is marked bya preoccupation with gloom,mystery, and terror. It mayinvolve the supernatural.The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764) began the movement.

American Gothic Literature

Many writers followed him, and in the United States, the first well-known Gothic novelist was Charles Brockden Brown. Later, both Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the Gothic mode.

American Gothic Literature

The term “Gothic” has also been extended to denote a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom or terror, represents events which are uncanny, or macabre, or

American Gothic Literature

melodramatically violent, and often deals with psychological states.

American Gothic

LiteratureThe settings for these pieces of literature could be in any time period, a gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels,

American Gothic

Literaturewith plentiful use of ghosts, mysterious chilling terror and a variety of horrors.

Elements of the Gothic Novel

• An atmosphere of mystery and suspense.

• An ancient prophecy• Omens, portents,

visions• Supernatural or

otherwise inexplicable events

• High, even overwrought emotion

• Women in distress• Women threatened by

a powerful, impulsive, tyrannical male

• The metonymy of gloom and horror

Southern Gothic Literature

The South’s reputation for sultry decadence lives on in a literature that meshes the moody romanticism of Gothic novels with the American South’s sensibility of tragedyand doom.

Southern Gothic Literature

The South’s mystique of decay and danger became a preoccupation for some mid-twentieth century novelists.William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor are sometimes

Southern Gothic

Literaturegrouped together in the category of Southern Gothic because of the gloom and pessimism of their fiction.