Entertainment / Literature / Gothic Literature: Poetry, short stories, or novels designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural. As J. A. Cuddon suggests, the conventions of gothic literature include wild and desolate landscapes, ancient buildings such as ruined monasteries, cathedrals, castles with dungeons, torture chambers, secret doors, and winding stairways, apparitions, phantoms, demons, and necromancers, an atmosphere of brooding gloom, and youthful, handsome heroes and fainting (or screaming!) Heroines who face off against corrupt aristocrats, wicked witches, and hideous monsters. Conventionally, female characters are threatened by powerful or impetuous male figures, and description functions through a metonymy of fear by presenting details designed to evoke horror, disgust, or terror (see Cuddon's discussion, 381-82). The term Gothic originally was applied to a tribe of Germanic barbarians during the dark ages and their now-extinct language, but eventually historians used it to refer to the gloomy and impressive style of medieval architecture common in Europe, hence 'Gothic Castle' or 'Gothic Architecture.' The term became associated with ghost stories and horror novels because early Gothic novels were often associated with the Middle Ages and with things 'wild, bloody, and barbarous of long ago' as J. A. Cuddon puts it in his Dictionary of Literary Terms (381). See Gothic, above, and Gothic novel, below.
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Literature Adjective Synonyms: writing(s), letters, belles-lettres, creative writing(s)
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Entertainment / Literature / Gothic: The word Gothic originally only referred to the Goths, one of the Germanic tribes that helped destroy Rome. Their now-extinct language, also called Gothic, died out completely. The term later came to MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Metaliterature: Literary art focused on the subject of literary art itself. Often this term is further divided into metapoetry, metafiction, and metadrama. MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Literature Of Sensibility: Eighteenth-century literature that values emotionalism over rationalism. This literature tends to perceive feelings as more reliable guides to morality and truth than abstract principles, and thus it MORE