ENG 510 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Tabula Rasa, Absolute Difference, Ann Radcliffe
Document Summary
The medieval style gothic passes out of fashion, becoming clich by 1803, with jane austen"s parody of gothic, northanger abbey. The gothic shifts towards a different kind of story and setting. The supernatural is always present, but with the turn of the century, the supernatural takes a backseat to a gothic fiction with natural explanation. Mary shelley also places the gothic in the same time as the readers themselves (the then-present) The novel also features plotlines that would have been familiar to its contemporary audience: ex: walton"s desire to explore the north pole. The gothic becomes concurrent with the timeframe of the readers. No longer about some long-gone era or exotic corner of the world, but about a reality that is a lot like ours and about characters that are a lot like us. This raises questions about morality, ethics, the nature of science, etc.
