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Stevenson + Victorian Gothic Notes (ENGL 221)
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Stevenson + Victorian Gothic Notes (ENGL 221)
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The Victorian Gothic & Robert Louis StevensonMarch 9th, 2022 – ENGL 221 (Sam Fraser)
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
● A period of then-unprecedented industrialization, social change, and imperial growth
● Many in the period embraced this new modernity and shied away from the sentimental
pastoralism and introspection of the Romantic age
○ “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe” (Carlyle 174).
● Others felt great anxiety about the radically advanced world in which they suddenly
found themselves.
● With industrialization came poverty and pollution; with social change came political
agitation; with imperialism came military action and colonial oppression.
Victorian Literature
● The novel continues to gain prominence, helped by two modes of publication: serial
publishing and three-volume publications (each part of a novel published individually).
○ Three volume: each part is published individually and generally distributed to the
public by a lending library like Mudie’s or W. H. Smith.
■ Thomas Hardy, the Bronte sisters, Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
○ Serial publication: individual chapters appearing in weekly/monthly periodicals or
on their own.
■ Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Louis Stevenson
● Short serial fiction also becomes more widespread.
○ Arthur Conan Doyle
○ Much of this work is inexpensive and devoted to “lowbrow” or melodramatic
subject matter. So begins the tradition of “penny dreadfuls.”
■ Penny dreadfuls: inexpensive, easy to produce works devoted to
melodramatic subjects. A lot of protagonists were thieves, murderers and
highwaymen. “Low-cost horror/melodrama/crime fiction.”
● Airport supermarket fiction.
Gothic Fiction
● Begins with Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), but does not become widespread until
the 19th century
○ Frankenstein (1818), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dracula (1897)
○ Edgar Allan Poe: a good example of American gothic literature
● Often concerned with antique places, hidden pasts, and the intrusion of something
irrational or unsettling on a seemingly settled world.
○ “Gothic fictions generally play with and oscillate between the earthly laws of
conventional reality and the possibilities of the supernatural … usually raising the
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