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Gothic Tradition
The interest in non-rational experience, which was part of the Romantic reaction against the eighteenth-century rationalism, took many forms. One was the world of horror, sentiment and picturesque scenery which come alive in the Gothic Novels of the period ( Ann Radcliff and Mary Shelley). The apogee of the genre obtained with A. Radcliff’s The Misteries of Udolpho was highly prised and continued to be influential until Dickens and Trackerey started a new phase of writing based on immediate social experience. The Gothic vogue affected not only Fiction, but also Poetry like in the case of Lord Byron [S] [I] [E] [E2](for the figure of the Byronic hero [F] or overreacher wandering alone from land to land); P.B. Shelley [E1] [E2] [E3] [E4](for the great importance given to feelings and the belief in nature as a powerful force); S. T. Coleridge [I 1] [I 2] [E1] [E2] (for the presence of supernatural images and characters in his Rime of the Ancient mariner and for the description of stormy and dull settings); J. Keats [F](in his Odes, The Eve of Saint Agnes and La Belle Dame sans mercy where he talks about mysterious and supernatural characters and shows the contrast beween illusion and real world).
Generally, the main elements of Gothic tradition are:
fear;
suspence;
sublime;
description of landscapes, especially of shipwrecks, cliffs,woods and snowstorms;
terror;
melancholy;
supernatural creatures, such as ghosts or femme fatale [F1];
dreams;
medieval castles.
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