Critical Gothic Terminology

Critical Gothic Terminology: Exam Prep

Archetype: A paradigmatic or stock character with universal application, regardless of time, place or genre. E.g. The dashing hero; the troubled genius; the scolding wife; the strong-spirited daughter.

Horror: Constructed from a maze of alarmingly concrete imagery designed to induce fear, shock, revulsion, and disgust. Horror appeals to lower mental faculties, such as curiosity and voyeurism. Elements of horror render the reader incapable of resolution and subject the reader's mind to a state of inescapable confusion and chaos.

Terror: Creates a sense of uncertain apprehension that leads to a complex fear of obscure and dreadful elements. The essence of terror stimulates the imagination and often challenges intellectual reasoning to arrive at a somewhat plausible explanation of this ambiguous fear and anxiety. Resolution of the terror provides a means of escape.

Supernatural: What is above nature, mysterious, inexplicable. Usually is a power that is beyond scientific explanation or the laws of nature.

The Sublime: The word sublime conveys a sense of height or loftiness, coming to signify the highest in a particular category (i.e., the sublime style, the sublime of war, the moral sublime).  The modern sublime shifts away from the classical aesthetic emphasis on regularity and harmony, to emphasize irregular, even chaotic forces. Rejects Enlightenment clarity for the pleasurable/terrifying sense that all cannot be known about a particular landscape. The sublime is associated with “masculine” qualities of strength and size (capable of evoking admiration, awe or terror).

Sublime Terror: "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger ... is productive of the strongest emotion"

The Beautiful: The beautiful is associated with feminine qualities of smallness, smoothness, and delicacy.

The Grotesque: From a literary standpoint, this term implies a mutation of the characters, plants...