Society, Culture, and the GothicINTRODUCTION
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
PRIMARY SOURCES
OVERVIEWS
RACE AND THE GOTHIC
WOMEN AND THE GOTHIC
FURTHER READING
Introduction
The Gothic tradition originated in response to a period of rapid and far-reaching societal, cultural, and theological change in eighteenth-century Europe. Works written in this tradition are inherently linked to the social context in which they were created, and a great deal of critical commentary focuses on the representation of societal and cultural fear in the face of the dissolution of tradition, gender roles, oppression, and race in Gothic literature. As scholars have illustrated, people in nineteenth-century Europe and America believed strongly in physiognomy, the theory that physical appearance and "blood" determined and reflected a person's character. The representation of villains and monsters in Gothic literature demonstrates this adherence to physiognomy, as these characters possess physical traits associated with evil—dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, and dark complexions. The racist implications of this belief in the biological determination of character are apparent, and have been examined by several scholars.
In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke challenges the ways in which other philosophers and aestheticians use the terms "sublime" and "beautiful," contending that the words are often employed inaccurately and exclusively.
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