Talk:Gothic fiction

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The contents of the Elements of American Gothic page were merged into Gothic fiction on 13 February 2015. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

Text and/or other creative content from this version of Translation of the Eighteenth century Gothic novel was copied or moved into Gothic fiction with this edit. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

I tied up the contemporary gothic subsection some months back, but the rest of this article is dearly in need of help.

• The opening is just a parade of author names that provides very little useful information to the reader (compare the article on Horror fiction, which actually provides a reputable definition and lists elements found in the genre). The subsections are organised rather randomly.
• The word contemporary is used in both of its (opposite) meanings (compare Contemporary developments in Germany, France and Russia vs Contemporary Gothic, which cover the 19th century and the 21st respectively), which only helps to confuse the new reader.
• The top image (The Abbey in the Oakwood) is only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Surely there is an illustration from one of the out of copyright classic gothic novels we can use?
• The section titled Precursors has good content, but its not actually about precursor genres. Instead it a mixture of explaining the elements of gothic literature, and describing early gothic and pre-gothic novels. These perhaps should be separated into two sections. The article as a whole has a weak section that actually explains the characteristics of Gothic literature, and some of this content could be expanded into that, while the rest can be folded into the wider history section.
• The article is generally lacking in 21st century sources, which is honestly disappointing to see and severely hurting its coverage of the last 30 years of Gothic literature. The Gothic Studies Journal, Studies in Gothic Fiction, as well as Aeternum - the Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, and the Dark Arts Journal should surely have some useful material. There have also been many published books on this topic over the last 20 years.

Addition to this - There is just one reference published in the last 5 years.

• The placement of Elements of Gothic fiction last should seriously be reconsidered. This section also needs more citations, and focuses heavily on quotes instead of descriptions of the characteristics. There are also certain wording issues that make me question if sections have been copied wholesale from published books. For example "As the review states, the virginal maiden character is above inspection as her personality is flawless". (What review?)

Before I begin rewriting it wholesale, I would like feedback on the points I have raised above. JT_dale^Talk~ 09:19, 9 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

I generally agree with it. I think it would be best to create sandbox page for the new version of "Precursors", but I don't think the other edits should be controversial (as long as there isn't removal of current information, like in the previous attempt to "improve" this article :) ). StjepanHR (talk) 12:51, 9 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

I have reorganised the page structure as the very first step in trying to rein this article in. However, it remains an unwieldy disaster. There are simply too many topics being covered simultaneously, and without much organisation, while also approaching the topic in potentially too academic a manner for Wikipedia.

Continuing issues of note

• The female Gothic and The Supernatural Explained is a very unwieldy section, which attempts to provide good information but gets sidetracked to provide a plot synopsis of Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest.
• History is divided into many competing sections, not always ordered chronologically. Some subsections seem to be superfluous or repeating information provided elsewhere, or worded in such a way that I seem to be missing what they're trying to contribute.

• Particularly the entire Precursors section seems unnecessarily long and divided - surely what it is trying to say can be said more concisely and combined into one section that outlines the same information?
• Southern gothic is nothing but a list of author names, providing entirely no information to the reader about what really defines Southern gothic.

• Contemporary gothic remains in need of expansion, as does the section on Scholarship — Preceding unsigned comment added by JTdale (talk • contribs)

Thanks for wading in here, JTdale. I agree that there are a lot of longstanding flaws in this article. I made some structural edits myself just now but there is still much to do. Some thoughts:

The "female gothic & explained supernatural" section was especially bad since (as a subject area expert) I would say those two things are not particularly linked except in Radcliffe specifically. I moved some of the explained supernatural stuff to the section on Radliffe and tried to edit the female gothic bits down to just the least-incoherent, but it's still a quite bad summary of what is actually a very large and robust body of scholarship. (It should reference, eg, Madwoman in the Attic, and the famous piece on Bluebeard.) In general, removing unsourced content might be a way to usefull condense the article.

Gothic fiction#Role of architecture and setting in the Gothic novel should have all those examples reduced to a single sentence with a wikilink -- if the specific examples are well-sourced they can be moved to the novel's own page.

I tried to improve the images a bit, but a lot of them still seem decorative, rather than meaningfully linked to the subject matter per MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE-- eg 19thC paintings next to a discussion of unrelated 18thC books. Going through and writing more thorough captions for all of them can probably help diagnose which ones don't belong where they are.

I'm not convinced that a "characteristics" section can actually exist in a meaningful way. Over 250 years across multiple countries, the Gothic has had a lot of characteristics. If we boil it down, anything that goes in a pan-Gothic overview ought to be applicable to all of The Castle of Otranto, Jane Eyre, The Telltale Heart, and The Sound and the Fury. To avoid an OR, some kind of literary encyclopedia on the Gothic might be the best source.

It was invigorating to see this article moving around. I don't have time to edit in a sustained way at this moment but hope to keep poking in. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:26, 4 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for your contributions. I agree re: the images, the plate for The Castle of Otranto at the top seems to be the most relevant of all the images presently.

Personally, I think that a characteristics section can definitely be crafted in such a way that it remains useful. For example, I think that Translation as a Framing Device is (correctly) referenced as a common characteristic, but the key remains to explain them in a way that provides an inclusive definition not an exclusive one - many Gothic novels use this device, but not all.

Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst provides a definition that might be a useful stepping off point for us -

As Gothic ages, it has moved beyond its origins in architecture and the printed page to become fully transmedial, its tropes and motifs recurring in novels, films, television, fine art, comics, fashion, computer games, and the dark web of the internet itself. Gothic plots often revolve around ideas of transgression, the breaching of boundaries of life and death, good taste and bad, knowledge and belief...

— Luckhurst, Roger

Throughout the book he then identifies a series of tropes he believes characterize Gothic (specifically as an entire artistic movement, not just literature) - The pointed arch, ruins, the fragment (his term for the device of a Gothic story being told as if translated or part of a lost manuscript), labrinyths, the framing device of the Gothic house, the landscape, monsters. He also has a section expanding on the various regional variants as divided by compass directions. JT_dale^Talk~ 06:18, 5 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Architecture in English Fiction, by Warren Hunting Smith (1934) contains--especially in chapters 2 and 3--an important early contribution to understanding this genre. 173.17.176.73 (talk) 15:15, 15 September 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hello everyone! I know this article has several issues, but I was planning on translating it to Portuguese when I found out that a version already exists. It turns out the problem is that it doesn't appear in the language options of this article, because the interlanguage link is with Gothic literature, which redirects here.

The Portuguese article in question is written in a similar line as this one, including a brief history of the Goths and some Brazilian examples, and excluding some topics like Female Gothic and Russian Gothic. I could try to compare both articles more thoroughly and see if there is a way to improve both with translation (translating a paragraph or a section), but I would love your opinion/help with this first. JoNeuen (talk) 23:11, 3 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I think a discussion (or at least a mention) of Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast novels should be included in this article. Pcovitz1968 (talk) 16:39, 3 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 August 2024 and 9 December 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Randomuser1233 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Randomuser1233 (talk) 02:29, 4 October 2024 (UTC)Reply