Gothic O Gótico

Gothic
A Gothic tale usually takes place (at least some of the time) in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space – be it a castle, a foreign palace, an abbey, a vast prison, a subterranean crypt, a graveyard, a primeval frontier or island, a large old house or theatre, an aging city or urban underworld, a decaying storehouse, factory, laboratory, public building. Within this space, or acombination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story. These hauntings can take many forms, but they frequently assume the features of ghosts, specters, or monsters (mixing features from different realms of being, often life and death) that rise from within theantiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view.

* Terror Gothic: this holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity kept largely out of sight or in shadows or suggestions from a hidden past.
* Horror Gothic: this confronts theprincipal characters with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms (including the repressions) of everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting, consequences.

The readership of Gothic is mostly middle-class and its aspirations are to force people to confront what is psychologically buried in individuals or groups, includingtheir fears of the mental unconscious itself and the desires from the past now buried in that forgotten location. This became a basis for Sigmund Freud’s fin de siècle sense of the unconscious as a deep repository of very old, infantile, and repressed memories or impulses, the archaic underworld of the self. The features of the Anglo-European-American Gothic have helped to prefigure and shapeFreud’s notion of Oedipal conflict in the middle-class family. Through the Gothic, we remind ourselves, albeit in disguise, that something like a return to the confusion and loss of identity in being half-inside and half-outside the mother, and thus neither entirely dead nor clearly alive, may await us behind any old foundation, paternal or otherwise, on which we try, by breaking it up, to build a bravenew world.

The first published work to call itself “A Gothic Story” was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto printed in England in 1764.The book tells the story of Manfred, a lord of a castle and his family. Then it exploded in 1790s throughout the British Isles, on the continent of Europe and briefly in the United States.
Female readers were the common owners and it remained so popular asa literally mode throughout what we call Romantic period in Europe.

The Romanticism was a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matterin an imaginative form." Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly the focal points of romanticism. Any list of particular characteristics of the literature of romanticism includes subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of andworship of nature; and fascination with the past, especially the myths and mysticism of the middle ages.

It is in this romantic period that many Gothic figures are born - Frankenstein's monster and vampires for example.

Johan Konrad Dippel (August 10, 1673 – April 25, 1734)who was a German pietist(lutheranism) theologian, alchemist and physician was claimed to be Mary Shelley's model for...