Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

a framework under which transgressive works can be discussed and analyzed, as well as
investigate the corollaries between the poetics and politics of transgression and more
specifically, the ways in which the literary characteristic of transgression suggests that
works of art can act subversively in order to contribute to paradigm shifts both in
academia and in society.
Due to the advent of new critical approaches and interpretive techniques in the
second half of the twentieth century, the Gothic has experienced some type of “revival,”
and the number of secondary sources published on the subject is extensive. Nevertheless,
I attempted to focus on the most relevant sources to discuss the particular concepts that I
most concerned with. Walter Allen, in The English Novel: A Short Critical History, and
Ernest A. Baker, in The History of The English Novel, were first consulted in order to
provide a historical background of the Gothic. Nevertheless, James Watt’s Contesting
the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 and Michael Gamer’s
Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon-Formation provide for the
most comprehensive contemporary analysis of the Gothic, especially as it pertains to the
patterns of reception of the genre in the burgeoning literary market of the late eighteenth
century. Both authors observe that the cultural ideologies of the period established a
hierarchy of genre and stigmatized the Gothic as a “low”—and thus, non-canonical—
form of cultural production. In addition, Gamer investigates how the Gothic contributed
to the then-emerging “romantic ideology” which canonized authors such as Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Several books and collections of essays
explore the interpretative possibilities of the Gothic provided by psychoanalytical
criticism—and especially Freud’s theories as articulated in “the Uncanny,” which
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