Check out how others have defined the Gothic!
Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. Property and Power in English Gothic Literature. McFarland, 2015.
“Indeed, the typical moment of the English Gothic text is the moment after the fall from the idyllic past in which possession had been securely fixed. The ostensible project of the Gothic is to return to the idyllic moment of secure and undisrupted possession. However, the actual effect of the Gothic narrative is to undermine the certainties of secure possession, the kind of certainty that is popularized as ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law.’
Botting, Fred. Gothic, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=1480738.
“Gothic texts are, overtly but ambiguously, not rational, depicting disturbances of sanity and security, from superstitious belief in ghosts and demons, displays of uncontrolled passion, violent emotion or flights of fancy to portrayals of perversion and obsession…Gothic texts are not good in moral, aesthetic or social terms. Their concern is with vice: protagonists are selfish or evil; adventures involve decadence or crime.”
Bowen, John. The Gothic. The British Library, 15 May 2014. www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/videos/the-gothic.
“[The Gothic] wants to see the relationship between the modern world and the past – not as one of evolution or development – but of sudden juxtaposition and often violent conflict, in which the past erupts within the present and deranges it and one of the most powerful motifs of that is, of course, the ghost. The thing that you think is dead but comes back vividly alive in the present…One really useful term for thinking about Gothic writing, is the uncanny. Now this is a term that comes from Sigmund Freud – so something that’s new but that also takes us back to something, either in our own psychological past, or something in the world that’s archaic.”
Davison, Carol Margaret. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824. University of Wales Press, 2009.
“As C. C. Barfoot extrapolates, ‘The Gothic highlights cultural encroachment and the invasion of boundaries, and dramatizes the disturbances caused by geographical dislocation, as well as by the rift between the secular and the sacred, innocence and guilt, the beautiful and the ugly, surface and depth. In its various psychic explorations and conceptualizations of self-consciousness as a type of onerous ‘Fall’ out of innocence into knowledge and self-division, the Gothic is typically Romantic.”
Emandi, E. M. “Main Features of the English Gothic Novel”. International Journal of Social and Educational Innovation (IJSEIro), Vol. 3, no. 6, May 2016, pp. 67-78. https://journals.aseiacademic.org/index.php/ijsei/article/view/92.
“Whereas the classical was well-ordered, simple, pure and offered a set of cultural models to be followed, the Gothic was chaotic, ornate, convoluted, representing excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and uncivilized. The extensions in meaning mirror the word “Gothic” as retaining a stock of connotations, the values placed upon them being under constant transformation during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It is always to be found as a concatenation of dualities: old-fashioned as opposed to modern, barbaric as opposed to the civilized, crudity as opposed to elegance etc.” (p. 68)
Gothic Literature – Study Guide. https://americanliterature.com/gothic-literature-study-guide.
“Originating in England and Germany in the later part of the 18th century, [the Gothic literary tradition] grew out of Romanticism, a strong reaction against the Transcendental Movement. Dark Romanticism draws from darker elements of the human psyche, the evil side of spiritual truth. Gothic literature took that further, involving horror, terror, death, omens, the supernatural, and heroines in distress.”
Halych, Oksana. “Mysterious Fears: Lexical Means of Expressing the Conceptual Category of the Mystic In English Gothic Narration of the 18th Century.” Lege Artis (De Gruyter Open), vol. 3, no. 2, Sciendo, Dec. 2018, pp. 38–71, doi:10.2478/lart-2018-0014.
“In English Gothic prose, the Mystic is distinguished as a genre feature, connected with the motif of mystery, belief in a supernatural power, irrationality as a certain way of world cognition, grounded on the atmosphere of fear aggravation in the face of unknown danger.”
Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2005.
“The stories of gothic novels are always stories of transgression. The transgressive acts at the heart of gothic fiction generally focus on corruption in, or resistance to, the patriarchal structures that shaped the country’s political life and its family life, and gender roles within those structures come in for particular scrutiny. Further, and importantly, these acts are often violent, and always frightening. For gothic novels are above all about the creation of fear- fear in the characters represented, fear in the reader- and they accomplish this through their engagement with the aesthetic of the sublime or some variant of it” ( v).
Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 1–20. Literature Online, nuncio.cofc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.nuncio.cofc.edu/books/introduction/docview/2137989537/se-2?accountid=9959. Accessed 25 Jan. 2021.
“[The Gothic] is about its own blurring of different levels of discourse while it is also concerned with the interpenetration of other opposed conditions – including life/death, natural/supernatural, ancient/modern, realistic/ artificial, and unconscious/conscious – along with the abjection of these crossings into haunting and supposedly deviant “others.”
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body : Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle . Cambridge University Press, 1996.
“Gothic in particular has been theorized as an instrumental genre, reemerging cyclically, at periods of cultural stress, to negotiate the anxieties that accompany social and epistemological transformations and crises.”
Johnson, Laura. The Gothic Tradition. 2012. scholar.harvard.edu/files/lauraforsberg/files/gothic_tradition_tutorial_syllabus.pdf .
“The Gothic tradition is a body of literature fundamentally concerned with the boundaries between past and present, reality and the supernatural, morality and immorality, guilt and victimization, and reason and faith or superstition.”
Kennedy, Patrick. “What Is Gothic Literature?” ThoughtCo. www.thoughtco.com/gothic-literature-2207825.
“Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread. Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.”
Killeen, Jarlath. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914: Gothic Literature 1825-1914, University of Wales Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=474782.
“In an era defined by broadly left-leaning academics, and when versions of Marxism and port-structuralism became default critical positions, many writing on Gothic took the broad view that it operated as an alternative and a response to the dictates of realism” (7).
“Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements. . Encyclopedia.com. 12 Jan. 2021.” Encyclopedia.com, Encyclopedia.com, 23 Jan. 2021, www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/gothic-literature.
“The Gothic, a literary movement that focused on ruin, decay, death, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”
Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. Continuum, 2004. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=377542&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
“Hallmarks of the Gothic include a pushing toward extremes and excess, and that, of course, implies an investigation of limits. 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.”
Pagan, Amanda. “A Brief History of Gothic Horror.” The New York Public Library, The New York Public Library, 18 Oct. 2018. A Brief History of Gothic Horror | The New York Public Library (nypl.org)
“Early novels in the gothic horror subgenre heavily feature discussions of morality, philosophy, and religion, with the evil villains most often acting as metaphors for some sort of human temptation the hero must overcome. The novels’ endings are more often than not unhappy, and romance is never the focus.”
Mărgău, Paul. “Changes of Perception in Gothic Literature. An Inquiry into the Effects of Reading Gothic.” British and American Studies : B.A.S, vol. 21, no. 21, Editura Universităţii de Vest din Timişoara / Diacritic Timisoara, 2015, pp. 31–38.
“One of the major characteristics of Gothic literature is that it has a ripple effect, over time and space, on our concepts of Self and Society, due to its being a distinct type of literature, with a function of psychological release, mediating the conflicts and sociocultural anxieties of the writer and of the reader.”
Morin, Christina. The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829. Manchester University Press, 2018.
“‘The Gothic novel’, in turn, signifies ‘[a] strain of the novel’ that developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century and enjoyed notable popular success before exhausting itself in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Commonly understood to begin with Horace Walpole’s The castle of Otranto (1764), its defining characteristics include, as David Punter outlines, ‘an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of suspense’.”
Varma, Devendra P. “Quest of the Numinous: The Gothic Flame.” The Gothic Flame, Russell and Russell, 1957, pages 206-231.
“The full-blown Gothic novel is distinguished by three individual qualities: the subjectivity of the writer; a love of the picturesque later turning into a passion for the supernatural and horrible; and thirdly, it is also a barometer of reaction against the preceding age of literature…recording a gentle and unconscious revulsion.”
Wasserman, Renata R. M. “Gothic Roots: Brockden Brown’s Wieland, American Identity, and American Literature.” Ilha do Desterro, no. 62, 2012, pp. 197-217,371. ProQuest, http://nuncio.cofc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.nuncio.cofc.edu/scholarly-journals/gothic-roots-brockden-browns-wieland-american/docview/1346647873/se-2?accountid=9959.
“The Gothic is a genre agreed to be particularly appropriate for the expression of cultural, as well as psychological anxieties of a subterranean kind, hard to acknowledge in other ways. The Gothic form, popular in English literature, where it gave sensationalistic treatment to matters of gender, class, national identity and religious affiliation, proved adaptable to conditions overseas.”
Watt, James. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
“In a period of industrialization and rapid social change, according to Punter, Gothic works insistently betrayed the fears and anxieties of the middle classes about the nature of their ascendancy, returning to the issues of ancestry, inheritance, and the transmission of property: ‘Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational.’”
Yang, Jessica. “Dermatologic Conditions as Vehicles of Horror in Gothic Literature.” Clinics in Dermatology, vol. 38, no. 5, Elsevier Inc, Sept. 2020, pp. 569–73, doi:10.1016/j.clindermatol.2020.04.008.
“Gothic literature is a combination of elements such as romanticism, horror, morbidity, and supernaturalism. Oftentimes, dermatologic conditions afflict the villain or antihero to further underline the protagonist’s plight and provide a feeling of dread and horror.”