By: Mac Stagg and David
 A group of European tribes from ancient history
 Originated from the Island of Gottland
(Denmark)
 Tribes grew numerous and
powerful enough to sack
sacked the great Roman
Empire in 410
 They ruled Europe for 250
years before slowly fading
into ancient history.
 Goths
 a nomadic people
 a reputation for ruthless violence
 religious people; worship of pagan deities.
 Gothic art, architecture and
literature date back to the
12th –15th centuries
 Gothic music today
 relatively new development
 the greatest impact on the
development of gothic
subculture.
 subculture
 based largely
on a certain
style of art,
literature, and
music.
 affinity for the macabre
 a longing for romance
 appreciation of darker aesthetics
 Gothic (goth-IK): a literary style
popular during the end of the 18th
century and the beginning of the
19th.
 This style usually portrayed
fantastic tales dealing with horror,
despair, the grotesque and other
“dark” subjects.
 Gothic literature was named for the
apparent influence of the dark
gothic architecture of the period on
the genre.
 Many Gothic tales took places in
such “gothic” surroundings.
 Darkness in everyday setting
 the quaint house where the man goes mad from the
"beating" of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale
Heart.”
 In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to
their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were
told from many different points of view.
 This literature gave birth to many
other forms
 such as suspense
 ghost stories
 horror, mystery
 Poe's detective stories.
 Gothic literature wasn't so different
from other genres in form as it was
in content and its focus on the
"weird" aspects of life.
 This movement began to slowly
open many people's eyes to the
possible uses of the supernatural in
literature.
 Gothic fiction
(Gothic horror)
 combines elements of
both horror and
romance.
 believed to have been
invented by the English
author Horace Walpole,
 1764 novel
 The Castle of Otranto.
 Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both
psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural,
ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles,
darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and
hereditary curses.
 Further contributions to the
Gothic genre were provided in
the work of the Romantic poets.
 Coleridge's The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner and Christabel
 Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci
(1819) and Isabella, or the Pot of
Basil (1820)
 Influenced novels of premiere
Gothicist Anne Radcliffe
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
- Science Fiction BUT no scientific explanation of the monster's animation and
the focus instead on the moral issues and consequences of such a creation.
John William Polidori The Vampyre (1819)
- story revives Lamb's Byronic 'Lord Ruthven', but this time as a vampire.
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe
Shelley
Mary Shelley,
John William
Polidori
Citations………..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction
#First_Gothic_romances
2.http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work
/allam/general/glossary.htm
3. http://www.authorme.com/nonfiction/whatisgothic.htm
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goths