Rationalism In Gothic Literature

In these two styles that we are analyzing, all the facts are passed through the reason filter when receiving an exhaustive, rational and realistic explanation. We see, therefore, that what at first the reader considers inexplicable (it cannot be explained) ends up becoming unexplained (it can be explained), a procedure that clearly approximates the Gothic story to the detective fiction This point is confirmed by Hoveyda (1967: 19) who states that these types of novels, the Gothic, also called black novels, which were very much in vogue at the end of the 18th century, have a special feature: they begin with the fear of the invisible and end with an explanation, thus preceding the technique of the police novel that will be born in the West during

This fight of rationalism, mental challenge, clash with reality and suspense will be what gathers and adapts detective fiction. So it is not right to consider them opposed but rather the latter as the heir of the former. One of the essences, therefore, of both literary productions is nothing but the game that, beyond the transgression, the author establishes with the main character in the first instance and with the reader in fact, by means of destabilizing the daily reality of both of them. Consequently, the destabilizing elements become an integral part serving the literary architecture. At that moment, as readers and updaters of the written text, we have fallen into the trap which the author has designed and prepared for us. In other words, we are a transposition of the victim, and his fears, sleeplessness, need to explain what happened, anguish, fears... are ours. Therefore, the story has stopped being fantastic to become possible, or even worse, real.

Thus, if the aim of any framed text in the so-called detective fiction is to elicit in the reader certain uneasiness or anguish because of the possibility that a fact outside the established

There seems to be a thread that works out well the genre evolution –from its origins in the eighteenth-century English Gothic novel– and that has been characterized by a progressive and endless search for new ways of communicating to the reader the repertoire of restlessness, destabilization... which are part of their horizon of expectations from the initial terror to current