Can I read Art of Darkness : A Poetics of Gothic on EtoBox?

Art of Darkness : A Poetics of Gothic by Anne Williams is a reference work available to read on EtoBox.

What is Art of Darkness : A Poetics of Gothic about?

__Art of Darkness__ is an ambitious attempt to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama, and verse--including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's __The Castle of Otranto__, Shelley's __Frankenstein__, Coleridge's __The Rime of the Ancient Mariner__, and Freud's __The Mysteries of Enlightenment__--Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is "poetic," not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions, Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition. Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions such as the haunted castle and the family curse signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore "poetic" in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those "others" most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions: In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent, and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, i

Who reads Art of Darkness : A Poetics of Gothic?

Author

Anne Williams

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published

2009

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226899077

Category

reference

Subjects

History, Fiction, Literary Criticism

Rating

4 / 5 (49 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13