Gothic Literature Flashcards
Grade 12 · English · Flashcards
12 flashcards on the key terms, texts, and conventions of Gothic literature.
Flashcards
- Gothic fiction
- A genre combining horror, the supernatural, psychological terror, and romantic excess to explore the irrational and the repressed.
- The Castle of Otranto
- Horace Walpole's 1764 novel — the first recognized Gothic novel, establishing the genre's conventions.
- The uncanny
- Freud's concept of something familiar turned strangely disturbing — the foundation of Gothic unease.
- Doppelgänger
- A double or shadow self embodying the repressed or darker aspects of the protagonist.
- Frankenstein
- Mary Shelley's 1818 Gothic/science fiction novel exploring creation, responsibility, and the monstrous.
- Southern Gothic
- American Gothic subgenre using the South's history and landscape to explore decay, injustice, and the grotesque.
- The sublime
- The experience of overwhelming awe and terror — especially in Gothic wild nature and ruined architecture.
- Unreliable narrator
- A narrator whose credibility is compromised by bias, mental instability, or limited knowledge — central to Poe's Gothic tales.
- Wuthering Heights
- Emily Brontë's 1847 Gothic novel set on the Yorkshire moors, exploring obsessive love, revenge, and the supernatural.
- Atmosphere
- The pervading mood of gloom, decay, and dread essential to Gothic fiction — created through setting and description.
- Repression
- The psychological suppression of desires or memories — Gothic literature externalizes what is repressed into monsters, ghosts, and haunted spaces.
- Dracula
- Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic novel about a Transylvanian vampire — one of the most enduring monsters in literary and popular culture.
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