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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
“This is the definitive anthology of American Gothic tales, the one that offers the most representative range of major authors and texts, in addition to excellent introductions and helpful annotations.
- American Gothic Tales. by Various. Sometimes, the shotgun approach can be best when exploring a new genre. Award winning author Joyce Carol Oates certainly knows her way around American Gothic literature, having written some of its finest modern incarnations.
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle. by Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson’s indisputable classic The Haunting of Hill House usually takes up a lot of bandwidth when we talk about her best novels, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her final work, hews more closely to the precepts of the American Gothic genre.
- The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. by Edgar Allan Poe. Although he tinkered with several different genres during his short and troubled life, Edgar Allan Poe is synonymous with gothic horror.
- Wieland. by Charles Brockden Brown. Charles Brockden Brown may not be a household name, but his novel Wieland, or, the Transformation is considered the first American Gothic.
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.
Walpole's novel was imitated in the eighteenth century, but enjoyed widespread influence in the nineteenth century in part because of that era's indulgence in dark-romantic themes. Today, the Gothic continues to influence the novel, the short story, and poetry, and provides a major source of themes and elements in film making.
The Great Gatsby is not a Gothic novel but, like many twentieth-century American fictions, it does employ Gothic tropes: the city as labyrinth; the imprisoned maiden/femme fatale motif; the wasteland wilderness "Valley of Ashes" presided over by the bill-board of panoptican optician Dr. T. J. Eckleburgh, the mad-scientist
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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 Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, in which the eponymous protagonist turns out to be a stranger to himself – compelled by forces of which he is ...