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- To understand American literature, and indeed America, one must understand the Gothic, which is, simply, the imaginative expression of the fears and forbidden desires of Americans. The Gothic has given voice to suppressed groups, and has provided an approach to taboo subjects such as miscegenation, incest and disease.
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qhk57
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May 4, 2019 · While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature.
May 28, 2006 · Summary. From the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and the beginnings of a distinctive American literature, the Gothic has stubbornly flourished in the United States. Its cultural role, though, has been entirely paradoxical: an optimistic country founded upon the Enlightenment principles of liberty and “the pursuit of ...
- Eric Savoy
- 2002
The term American Gothic is an American genre that stems from the Gothic literature genre from Europe in the late eighteenth century. Why is American Gothic so important? American Gothic literature is important because it speaks to the darker side of humanity.
Oct 18, 2024 · This study reveals that the nineteenth-century American gothicists developed the gothic into an aesthetically sophisticated mode that engaged intensely with the pressing problems of American society, including moral citizenship, slavery, and the social status of women, and reimagined social realities in politically constructive manners.
understand which American hopes, fears, and anxieties are explored and critiqued by writers in the gothic mode; recognize the centrality of gothic literature to nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture; evaluate the generally skeptical, pessimistic, or critical positions adopted by gothic writers; discuss the role of ...
In exploring extremes, whether of cruelty, rapacity and fear, or passion and sexual degradation, the Gothic tends to reinforce, if only in a novel's final pages, culturally prescribed doctrines of morality and propriety.
An important variant of the Gothic contest against impersonal forces is the theme of the divided self, in which protagonists are motivated by uncon-scious desires and irrational impulses. Within the American Gothic tradition, this strain is arguably introduced by late eighteenth-century Gothicist Charles Brockden Brown, notably in his 1799 novel
