Gothic Beginnings
Apr. 10th, 2006 02:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales is divided into three sections - Beginnings, The Nineteenth Century, and The Twentieth Century. So far I’ve read the stories in the first section. Early gothic relies very heavily on unlikely coincidences, and that’s the thing that more than anything else is likely to disconcert a modern reader. Aside from coincidences the usual ingredients of early gothic are wicked monks or abbesses, cruel and avaricious fathers determined to thwart their daughters’ happiness, and rather bland but very virtuous heroes. The Ruins of the Abbey Fitz-Martin has most of these ingredients, but they’re combined with some skill, and with lots of the necessary atmosphere. The result is very entertaining. The Friar’s Tale (both these first two stories were published anonymously) has, unusually, a wicked abbess and a kindly and virtuous abbot. It also features the St Bernard dogs that were supposedly trained to rescue those lost in the mountains. The plot is fairly standard but it’s well done and quite enjoyable. The Vindictive Monk by Isaac Crookenden is representative of the stories churned out by hack-writers to cash in on the success of the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. It’s all very breathless and sensational but it’s exciting enough and has a certain perverse charm. Richard Cumberland’s The Poisoner of Montremos is a particularly outrageous example of the use of coincidence. Anna Laetitia Aikin’s Sir Bertrand: A Fragment is atmospheric enough. The Parricide Punished and Raymond: A Fragment by ‘Juvenis’ are both pretty awful.
Overall the early gothic tales were somewhat better than I expected.
dfordoom)The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales is divided into three sections - Beginnings, The Nineteenth Century, and The Twentieth Century. So far I’ve read the stories in the first section. Early gothic relies very heavily on unlikely coincidences, and that’s the thing that more than anything else is likely to disconcert a modern reader. Aside from coincidences the usual ingredients of early gothic are wicked monks or abbesses, cruel and avaricious fathers determined to thwart their daughters’ happiness, and rather bland but very virtuous heroes. The Ruins of the Abbey Fitz-Martin has most of these ingredients, but they’re combined with some skill, and with lots of the necessary atmosphere. The result is very entertaining. The Friar’s Tale (both these first two stories were published anonymously) has, unusually, a wicked abbess and a kindly and virtuous abbot. It also features the St Bernard dogs that were supposedly trained to rescue those lost in the mountains. The plot is fairly standard but it’s well done and quite enjoyable. The Vindictive Monk by Isaac Crookenden is representative of the stories churned out by hack-writers to cash in on the success of the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. It’s all very breathless and sensational but it’s exciting enough and has a certain perverse charm. Richard Cumberland’s The Poisoner of Montremos is a particularly outrageous example of the use of coincidence. Anna Laetitia Aikin’s Sir Bertrand: A Fragment is atmospheric enough. The Parricide Punished and Raymond: A Fragment by ‘Juvenis’ are both pretty awful.
Overall the early gothic tales were somewhat better than I expected.
