Gothic Background, Definitions, Motifs, etc.

>7 frahealee:

Yeah, I'm trying to brace myself to get back on with those 'key works'. I was reading them in the order Punter deals with them, and the wall I've hit is The Monk. I think I've had four goes at that, or may be five, so far, giving up each time. Ye gods it's boring! Must exercise some will power.

Actually, the last couple of times I've tried I haven't been posting on the thread in case I fail to finish it again. That's probably the wrong attitude. I should read with the intention of composing really nasty posts about it - that might get me through ...

>8 alaudacorax: I am sorry you found The Monk a problem. I started reading it expecting a horror but found it to be hilarious. I had just read The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey, two deliberately humorous stories about a medieval monk in Clonmacnoise, and was going to write a piece comparing the humorous horror with the serious horror. When I started reading "The Monk" the opening scene in the Church had me in stitches. I flew through the book and loved it. It came across as an assemblage of horror tropes. I was also interested in it by the history and youth of Matthew Lewis and his supposed intention in writing the novel.

Different strokes for different folks.

>10 frahealee: I have not read The Italian yet but I have it on Mount TBR and it is one I want to get round to before to long.

It's about 20 years since I read The Monk (the '90s was clearly my decade for being serious about tackling daunting and/or obscure books; The Canterbury Tales, Clarissa, Moby-Dick and Tristram Shandy were also read in that decade). I didn't find it hilarious but definitely had the sense of a young author exuberantly going over the top.

Strangely, the recent film version (2011) starring Vincent Cassel sticks closely to Lewis' story (as far as I could remember it) but is not at all either tongue-in-cheek or unintentionally funny and/or ludicrous. I thought it was pretty effective as straightforward horror.

>13 housefulofpaper: I was not aware of the film, so I shall have to seek it out.

I think the humour was in the earlier parts of the book but its effect on me was to lighten the subsequent scenes.

>15 frahealee:

Wow. You've got a lot of corkers in there for $1. Just a personal comment, but, Blackwood's 'The Empty House' and Dickens' 'The Signalman' are the two best, non-Poe, horror short stories I've ever read. Two quite different stories, I should add.

There's so much fodder here! I'm thinking I'll have to start making my own list, and nab my mother's copy of Wuthering Heights. I've looked at it but wasn't really sure it would be my thing.

I see The King in Yellow I snagged from Project Gutenberg. It's referred to a lot as one of Lovecraft's inspirations. I haven't look at it yet though. Need to update my e-reader.

>22 frahealee:

I wouldn't worry about the cliche part. I haven't read enough Gothic material for the cliche to get to me yet. ;) When I think of moors, I still think of The Hound of the Baskervilles and all the movies I've watched. I've yet to read the book. We have it though. It's the more the relationship part that I'm not sure about.

>25 frahealee:

I've just realised that I've somehow managed to get my ideas so confused that I thought The House of the Seven Gables was where Anne of Green Gables lived. If I'd ever thought about it clearly I'd probably have thought it was Hawthorne in an unusually sunny mood.

You are tempting me to set up my own New Year's Revolution Resolution Reading List - I really feel one coming on ...

I may have to make a list too, once I sort through what gothic matter I've already read, and what I might want to add to that list. I'd love to get my hands on a compendium but they tend to be horridly priced and the snow and cold have stranded me away from home for near two months so I can't get to my e-reader and current book pile!

>30 frahealee: I read the first part of Brothers Karamazov. I have other stuff on my mind this time around but it's on my shelf.

I just introduced myself to Machen and Bierce this year since I decided to start picking up books of ghost and horror stories from the library. I have an anthology of Bierce and a small book of M. R. James stories to leaf through when I get to it. No straight up reads planned for next year, except to actually do reading. I do still have that copy of Otranto, so I could put that on my "list" so that I can say I've read it!

I'm on a video game kick again, so I suppose I could also pick up that book on themes and such in the Souls games (Dark Souls and Bloodborne) since there's lots of fun Gothic in there as well.

>30 frahealee:

I am in awe of your planning and commitment.

>30 frahealee: In class where I read Far From the Madding Crowd (if that's the Hardy you're referring to) my prof warned that it was probably his least depressing book. Jude the Obscure is probably his worst. Might want to be ready for that.

>34 frahealee: Never read Faulkner, or any of the "F"s that appeared on my English Clubs "Erotic Continuum" cork board in our meeting room that got peppered with things like "What the Foucault?"

I'm doing the same thing with the Russian novels, but I may have put a very large amount of space in between War and Peace and Brother's K. Perhaps I should make that my reading once I'm done with my library book. I think my list is three books now:

1. Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave volume 2:
2. The Castle of Otranto
3. Brothers Karamazov

There's some Gothic in there.

>36 frahealee:
Under the Greenwood Tree is the closest Hardy ever gets to a merry romp. Some parts are quite funny.

>34 frahealee: - Tess was okay, better than expected.
Tess gut-punched me as a youngster--really traumatic experience--I mourned for her. Didn't read it again until quite recently, and it hit me almost as hard. I've just checked and, to my surprise, that reading was ten years ago--there have been a lot of books read since then that I've quite forgotten, while that one seems just a few months back.

ETA - Getting a real sense of déjà vu, there. I might be repeating myself with that last paragraph--apologies if so.

>36 frahealee: Oh, the board wasn't actually erotic. It's just the name it had before I got there so I'm not sure where it came from. It was mostly words, quotes, puns, and sketches.

PFSD ... Post-Faulkner Stress Disorder ...

>41 frahealee: I hope you enjoy them. I re-read The Unfortunate Fursey last year and enjoyed it all over again.

I have the definitive edition: Swan River Press.





:-)

>42 frahealee:

Neither of those books would be classed as Gothic, but of the two Clarissa is closer. The plot is Gothic or Romantic, the heroine is oppressed by her horrible family who want her to marry a dreadful older man for the sake of his wealth. She escapes with the aid of a local rakehell named Lovalace (pronounced "loveless", and pointing to his character, of course). He intends to have his way with her, and she is now in a more perilous position than she was in the family home.

So far, so standard romantic fare, you might suppose. But Samuel Richardson is doing several interesting things here. Of course first of all this is a work standing near the beginning of the history of the modern novel in English, so he's not ploughing a well-worn furrow here. It's an incredibly long book, I think it took me something like eight months to read, maybe 30-45 minutes a day. I found it too gruelling for long marathon sessions. It's an epistolary novel, all told in letters and so forth and surprisingly rich psychologically (for the time) and playing with narrating events from different viewpoints. It's purpose as I understand it was not solely as entertainment but as a kind of moral exemplar for the emerging middle classes. Clarissa is held up as not just admirable but a kind of secular saint. To modern sensibilities and for all I know sections of the original readership, her fate...painfully drawn out in the last quarter of the novel, is - weasel word alert - "problematic"; but I don't want to give too much away. Working from memory here, I think the book was an inspiration to a strand of non-supernatural or "domestic" Gothic. Am I right in thinking the Marquis de Sade was a fan?

There was a 3-part BBC adaptation around 1990, with Sean Bean as Lovelace and Saskia Wickham as Clarissa.

Tristram Shandy...no, not Gothic. Unless you were forced to sort all art into the Classical, rational, airy, enlightenment ideal, and its opposite. Then Tristram Shandy, a rambling, ruminating, winding-back-on-itself, post-modern-avant la lettre, not-to-forget-funny, celebration of small lives, domesticity, and eccentricity, would have to take its place alongside the likes of The Castle of Otranto, Wuthering Heights and so on, despite being a very ill-matched member of the team.

Surpringly this was filmed too, kind of. Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is the (fictional) depiction of his trying to film the book with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as versions of themselves playing Tristram and Uncle Toby, respectively. A relatively small amount of screen time is given over to scenes from the book, the rest is "behind the scenes" stuff. But the story of filming the book does echo the themes of the book.

>49 frahealee: I have been buying Swan River Press books as they come out. They are beautiful. As I get them regularly and go for the numbered editions I have the same number on them all. :-) The collection looks great on the shelf...when I can see it.

>48 frahealee:
Those book titles were simply indicative of the selection of that era, then. Not really, it was more that they were "difficult" books that supposedly are abandoned more often than they are read to the end. I did read them for pleasure, or pleasure + self improvement. About five years too late for my school exams I finally got interested in mainstream literature and, with a view to understanding the history of English literature, started reading.

I haven't read Pamela but I understand that it and Clarissa are stand alone works. They show the development of Richardson as a writer I understand, if read in the right order, but he also had an influence on writers who are now more famous than him. Henry Fielding switched from writing for the stage to writing novels with a parody of Richardson called Shamela, for example.

I hope the snowfall wasn't too extreme. I've seen stuff on social media that would be on front pages, and causing the Prime Minister to convene a meeting of COBRA, if it was happening here.

!970s for me too. My Blu-Ray player had given up the ghost (I got it from a friend for £10, so I can't complain) and I've reverted to my DVD box set of Night Gallery.

I saw "The Monk" as another publication in the "Victorian Best Sellers" batch that my copy of Otranto comes from. I just finished that last night. It was...not what I expected. Really, I expected more of a slog (that was the Preface, methinks) than a fast read over minimal line breaks until my brain ran out of its breath equivalent.

I do feel that 'sky helmet' (not a book quote ;)) needs to make its way into my vocabulary now.

Sky-Helmet (2 words) (if I knew how to type this in phonetics I'd do it)
- (noun) an event highlighted with great and inexplicable drama.
- (in literature) THIS IS BLOODY METAPHORICALLY RELEVANT! and probably literally relevant, too.

>53 WeeTurtle: Which one did you finish last night; The Monk or The Castle of Otranto?

>54 pgmcc: Castle. I'll need to snag The Monk from somewhere as I don't have it.

Neither is it on my library app it seems. Hm.

>55 WeeTurtle: The Monk appears to be available on Gutenberg if that is an option for you. The Monk was not what I had expected when I read it. There was more humour in it than I had expected; especially in the early stages.

>56 frahealee: Your comments on Varney the Vampire have inched me closer to reading it. As you know, I loved Melmoth the Wanderer yet found it a bit longer than necessary. I have shied away from reading Varney the Vampire because of its length, but if it read more quickly than Melmoth then it should not be a problem.