Lecture on the English Origins of Gothic Literature
             18th century Gothic fiction actually begins with art & architecture – a look back to the medieval world. England began to find itself in the midst of a societal unraveling throughout the 18th century. The philosophies of Shaftsbury, Adam Smith and David Hume – which for most of the century had provided the intellectual and upper classes with theories of action and motivation that justified their self-interested behavior – began to reveal themselves as insupportable.
             The contradiction between the English ideology in which individual desires and collective needs "participated in perfect reciprocity" and the actual economic and political conditions began to surface. It is out of this social climate that the look back to medievalism grew.
             Gothic castles were built as symbols of enduring power. They were uncompromising declarations of dynastic ambition that rested on their owner's control of others. Intended to evoke feudal powers, they were images of force, hierarchy, stability and command.
             How does this connect to a literature that by contrast provides reminders that power is ephemeral, that controls fail, and hierarchies totter? The connection is the emphasis on emotion. Gothic art & architecture was intended to have a magical or preternatural effect on the viewer, evoking a sense of awe, terror, insignificance, vulnerability or a sense of being at the mercy of a higher power (which is a particularly medieval world view).
             The gothic building – old, unfamiliar, mysterious and menacing in its "dark ages" associations – was the perfect setting for a story intended to terrify or otherwise overwhelm the reader. This combined with the paraphernalia of graveyard poetry written by 18th century melancholics like Beattie, Gray & Thompson – which emphasize the themes of human mortality, the cultivation of the sublim...