Romanticism In The Gothic Novel

One of the Gothic novel iconic characteristics lies in the disturbing return of the past menacing the present, usually literally expressed as family secrets and ghosts, for example. Here, we can find a parallel with the hauntings of later detective fiction narratives, in which some crime from the past threatens the social order in the present. Fred Botting (1996) says that while the Gothic novel, in its fascination with murder and intrigue, and in its presentation of diabolical deeds, seems to celebrate criminal behaviour, the horror associated with such transgressions becomes a powerful means to reinforce the values of society and virtue. In the Gothic novel the threat to the social order comes from a pre-Enlightenment past associated with

A series of writers (Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve or Sophia Lee, first and later Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, MG Lewis or Charles Maturin, who set their generic conventions), however, becoming aware of the genre versus two other subgenres, whose birth we can consider parallel (sentimental and historical), and as an act of rebellion, they launched into the adventure of writing something new that would violate the rules established by the classicist prescriptive aesthetic principles. Opposed to reason, they searched for the irrational and, facing the need for new inspiration sources and new audiences, they resorted to suspense, terror, the supernatural, which transgressed the strict literary rules, transposition, mirror and reflection of the corseted social conventions. In this endeavour, thus, they picked up the inherited cultural baggage, and they applied to it a good dose of intriguing

Not in vain, the maintenance of plausibility is one of the main concerns of the two genres to which we are referring here. The intrinsic verisimilitude of Gothic fiction is achieved not by the reader identification with the daily reality described (the authors of this type of production make a considerable effort –often reviled– so that the reader creates possible facts that, in fact, are impossible; thus, for example, we observe that authenticity in “Carmilla” or in Dracula, whose main characters, the monsters, in this case vampires, are still considered real by many people) but by the sense of reality offered to the reader by the authors (Rodríguez Pequeño, 1995: 134). In the case of detective fiction, the reader identification with the fictional detective takes place (remember Agatha Christie 's productions, for example), as well as occurs with the