Scary stories are indigenous to human artistry. Out of curiosity about the secrets of nature, human behavior, and unexplained bumps in the night, from ancient times people have investigated the mystic and aberrant and shared their findings about the unknown. When literary trends fled the high-toned, artificial sanctuary of the Age of Reason, the backlash against regularity and predictability sent literature far into the murky past to retrieve classic folksy about intriguing mysteries. The most accessible model of imaginative narrative derived from the Middle Ages, a fertile period textured with contrasts, great productivity and abominable crimes, piety and religious barbarism, admirable soldiery and the doings of witches, scientific innovation and the dabbling of alchemists, royal ritual and the dense macabre, and bold architecture to suit church and civic needs. The period thrived on a grand cultural exchange as wandering rabbis visited distant enclaves of Judaism. Traders imported the wonders of Asia, and Christian crusaders tramped the long road to Jerusalem (Walpole, pp. 156-161). The writings generated from the period range from saint lore and "Salve, Regina" to Reynard the Fox fables, Chinese spirit tales, troubadour love plaints, and stories of shape-shifting. Like finely stitched tapestry, the strands of medievalism held firm, lending their color and decorative meanderings to the late 1700s, when traditional gothic literature made its formal debut.
In this paper, I will focus on questions like; what is the role of architecture in gothic literature? What is projected onto this architecture to support an overvalued it continues to be the object? Why in this application to increase the presence not only in the theoretical literature or aesthetic but in the novel and poetry? The Gothic adjective used because many of the stories framed in medieval times, or the action took place in a castle, mansion or abbey of this architectural style. The intricacy of these, filled with passages, dark hollow unoccupied rooms, lend itself to creating disturbing environments.
Features of the genus:
The locations are fundamental Gothic: dark forests, dungeons, abandoned farms, dark streets, empty houses, crypts. The descriptions are abundances to create an atmosphere that grieves the reader. In fact, locating in these stories is the protagonist of suspense.
Appearance of corpses, ghosts, undead and other supernatural elements.
Travel in time or space. Some authors chose Eastern Europe as part of their works.
The world of dreams and nightmares also has a prominent place by alternating between reality and unreality.
The framework usually past that distance or no reader of this.
Characters controlled by their passions, intelligent and enigmatic, always attractive. Sometimes punished by guilt.
Usually we see a noble villain who symbolizes danger and an innocent maiden chased him. In counterpoint, the valorous hero, also of noble lineage, who will save it from terror, love is also an essential feature.
Gothic Settings
Gothic settings provide an allegorical and logical extension to the human character and behavior in gothic literature, as displayed in the hold of a prison hulk in New York Harbor, in Philip Freneau's poem, The British Prison-Ship (1781), the surgical suite of the mad scientist in Arthur Lewellyn Jones-Machen's The Great God Pan (1894), the arabesque tracery and lichened walls of Baskerville Hall in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), the trapdoors and subterranean retreats of master and slave in Edward Sorensen's Australian gothic novel The Squatter's Ward (1919), the ravenous house in Robert Marasco's neo-gothic novel Burnt Offerings (1973), and the intriguing floor plan and mirrored passages in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980). As the critic Anne Williams explains in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of gothic (1995), gothic draws on "the (fantasy) epitome of that distant time and place, a vast, enigmatic structure built at a time benighted as well as 'be-knighted,' when the population believed in ghosts and witches and superstitions of all kind.
Importance of Architecture
It has been said that the nineteenth century had invented the cathedral once, in the sense that the medieval house of worship been reinterpreted according to the ideological choices of the modern era, far removed from the designs of the religious symbolism of the Middle Ages. At the same time, a new site provided to the building in architectural reality of the urban fabric. It is mostly romantic generations who helped forge this new concept, for their effective participation in the movement of Architectural Heritage and the emphasis on medieval buildings in their writings. So until around 1880, everything seems to have been said about the beauty of Gothic architecture. What else does he write, in fact, after Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Michelet, yet far from being exhausted, this apologetic discourse continues to the end of the century, showing continuity of Gothic myth. The focus is always interested in the architectural achievements of the late Middle Ages, be it religious buildings (churches, cathedrals, abbeys) or civilians (towers, medieval cities), and diversified by exploring artwork subject to architecture (sculpture, painting, decorative arts, stained glass). Northern cities, visited as pilgrimage centers: Georges Rodenbach devotes two novels in Bruges; Charles Buet lingers to describe the city of Ghent on a plate on the Gothic Revival in Belgium. Maupassant's admiration for Rouen, "surprising museum of extraordinary Gothic monuments" is expressed on several occasions; Remy de Gourmont praises the wealth of Coutances.
Cathedrals
The eyes are always with the same emotion on the cathedral because it is not a typical building: it has several space-time dimensions. As a place of worship, it is the timeless space of the sacred as a construction material, it is the product of a specific historical period, and finally as an artistic achievement, it is the fullest expression of Gothic art. It can take many meanings (religious, secular, or political) from the perspective adopted. It partakes of the nature of matter by architectural object, but it steals from its function as a symbolic space. It is through this prism complex and unstable that Gothic architecture is seen in the imaginary end-of-century.
However, if the celebration of the architecture of the thirteenth century lasts beyond the romance, it gets to name new aesthetic values that significantly modify perception. The visible signs of a break with hasty interpretations can be detected both in the speech carried on buildings become historic monuments and representation of these places when transposed into fiction.
This is the vision conveyed by the literature end-of-century. In addition, the entrance of Gothic forms in literature is not without effect on writing because the curves of the nose, the air column slenderness, the softness of the stone pave the way for a vast field metaphorical. Gothic architecture is not only described in the register of aesthetic commentary; annexed by the rhetoric. At first glance, see what light is focused on the place as it is Gothic in the urban reality to the 1880s. The late nineteenth century denies the cathedral model who won in our cities and that results of all rehabilitation efforts undertaken since the turn of the eighteenth century by supporters of the Gothic Revival (Lewis, pp. 45-56). The cathedrals were meant to be seen within a framework that has been destroyed, in an environment that is no more. They were surrounded by houses whose appearance was consistent with theirs, and now they are bordered by five-story barracks, penitentiaries of dull, ignoble - and everywhere, they were released, although they were never built to stand up, isolated, squares.
Conclusion
It is, therefore, the sense of a break with an old order which is projected onto the building. Magnified representation of Gothic architecture in literature as in iconography makes us aware of this irretrievable loss, experienced as a loss. It was not the case in previous generations who sought, instead, tap into the artistic style fashioned by men of the Middle Ages the solution of regeneration through art (theory developed by Ruskin), imagining that enough to revive the architectural techniques of the past to find the creative impulse and spiritual which had invented. However, the authors of the century no longer believe the myth of the Renewal; they offer no vision of society, or collaborative solution, resolutely turned to pessimism and individualism. If the Gothic building crystallizes an incurable nostalgia, it provides shelter to these desperate people by allowing them to escape the hostility of the outside world.
Work Cited
Lewis, M. “The Monk: a romance”, 1st American reprint from 10th London ed, Moore & Jackson, 1845, Princeton University, 2008, pp. 45-56.
Walpole, H. “The Castle of Otranto”, Cassell, 1811, the University of Michigan 2007, pp. 156-161.
