American Gothic As A Subgenre Of Gothic Literature

2.1 American Gothic Literature

“From the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and the beginnings of a distinctive American literature, the Gothic has stubbornly flourished in the United States” (Savoy 167). American Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic literature in general, so it naturally shares many of its characteristics. The big difference however, lies in influence and concepts. “There is no doubt that the Gothic as a mode or genre, much like many of its representative texts, engenders feelings of dread and confusion among readers due to its inherent ambiguity” (Walsh 19).

As I established before, this literary genre is highly influenced by the idea of ruins and antiquated buildings and thus bases its fiction on the demolishing of civilized society. The plot of these tales is therefore most certainly going to include themes of abuse or degradation. Its historical background has to be taken into account here though, for the Western

When analyzing texts that belong to this particular kind of fiction, one should note “that the politically independent nation is almost as old as the genre itself, especially if we accept the common critical assumption that the literary Gothic came into being with the publication of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764” (Walsh 20).

Southern Gothic tales may not be set in ruined castles, mysterious or aristocratic dynasties that were used by European Gothic writers, but they nevertheless had their own source of blackness, which was not identified as evil but “racial blackness” (Lloyd-Smith 45). Heyejin claims that the early American Gothic repeatedly demonized the racial ‘Other’ and that Gothic images have been mostly “employed in American literature to expose the horrors of slavery, especially in antebellum slave narratives and novels”