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Horror Fiction throughout the Ages [EXAM]
Horror Fiction throughout the Ages
Throughout the course on Horror Fiction throughout the Ages the students encounter a number of different types of horror fiction ranging from the Gothic tale, Gothic horror fiction, modern horror fiction, strands in the horror fiction of Stephen King and the transgressive fiction of Palahniuk.
Thus, the students have a basic grasp of Gothic Horror Fiction in terms of its general genre conventions and the basic main themes in it: "the meaning of Gothic: non-modern (ancient, Medieval), "non-enlightened (irrational, religious), non-English (barbaric, uncivilised), non-ordered (chaotic)", "the ghastly and the beautiful", "an aesthetic of decadence", "the excessive sublime", "the supernatural", "the isolated, exotic setting", "the confounding of stable categories: death and life, light and darkness, present and past, reason and fancy, wakefulness and dream, knowledge and ignorance", "nature vs. culture, chaos vs. order, civilisation vs. barbarity", "delightful transgression and punishment", "terror vs. horror", "body (physicality) vs. psyche (psychology)", "subversive fiction vs. conservative fiction", "passion, belief, spirit, individual eccentricity, craft vs. mechanical, industrial and enlightened life", "monstrosity, breach of categories and the dobbelgänger-motif", "boundaries crossed and re-established", "the uncanny and repressed urges"; finally, mention has been made of the conflict between aristocracy (wealth/tradition/power) and populace (poverty/decrepit working-class), tyranny and democracy, in Gothic fiction, "the demonization of the (social) Other", "sexual deviance". Much of this has been seen in reading Poe.
Reading the ficition of H. P. Lovecraft then redoubled and standing on the shoulders of these (many) themes introduced a number of further interests of horror fiction; in particular the following stand out: "ancient lore, mythology and primitive religious belief", "criticism of modernity and the mechanical age in defence of primitive culture", "the cultured/scholarly main character and his destruction in encountering forbidden (Promethean) knowledge", "magic and the supernatural", "pwerless humanity in the face of mythical creatures"; "inherited guilt and fate", "deterministic fate (the protagonist cannot escape his own course of action)", "physical and mental degradation in confronting the supernatural", "the arcane Old World". All of this is then seen as reminiscences in the interests of Stephen King's modern horror fiction and his use of small-town, rural USA to elicit tension and terror while introducing the supernatural to his earthy settings. Finally, a sprout of all these tendencies is represented by the decidedly post-modern genre of transgressive fiction to show how horror fiction is transformed into a shattered mirror of modern life using transgression of every kind to elicit at least a flicker of what could earlier be the horrified response of the reader.
Texts and Materials
The students have sifted the internet to procure information on all texts and authors listed below.
The Raven, Poe, E. A. (1845)
The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe, E. A. (1843)
The Evil Clergyman, Lovecraft, H. P. (1933)
The Thing in the Moonlight, Lovecraft, H.P. (1929)
The Man in the Black Suit, King, S. (1994)
Swan Song, Palahniuk, C. (2005)
Series episode: "The Fall of the House of Usher" episode two "The Masque of the Red Death" (Netflix, S1:E2, dir. Mike Flanagan, Michael Fimognari, 2023)
"Gothic", from: Luckhurst, R., Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford (2005): x-xvi
Excerpts about horror as a mirror of the human psyche, society, and religion" in: "Horror" by Drisdal, R. & Rikstrup Hansen, J. Systime (2017)
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