![]() ![]() He acknowledges that this return of the historic repressed is a feature of other traditions (such as in England), but simultaneously claims that it is more acutely present and more specifically pertinent in Scottish manifestations of the mode. To put it schematically: Scottish Gothic represents (with greater historical and anthropological specificity than in England) the uncanny recursion of an ancestral identity alienated from modern life. He argues that The thematic core of Scottish Gothic consists of an association between the national and the uncanny or supernatural. Ian Duncan develops this idea when referring to early Scottish Gothic in his chapter ‘Walter Scott, James Hogg and Scottish Gothic’ (2001) 3. He refers to ‘a range of contemporary Scottish fictions, which suggest some of the issues and problems which accompany the depiction of past and present national history’, and focuses on ‘Gothic’s chief mode of functioning, which has to do with a certain dealing with the necessary distortions of history.’ 2For Punter, a number of examples of contemporary Scottish literature are concerned with distortions of the nation’s history (albeit, and perhaps moreover because it is, a stateless nation), in particular the myths and fabrications on which national identity is so often based. In his important article ‘Heartlands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic’ (1999) 1, David Punter pinpoints that idée fixe of the Gothic – a concern with history – as a defining feature of the texts he discusses. However, this prompts the question: is it possible to identify a continuous and distinct Scottish strand of the Gothic? A number of scholars have examined this concept of Scottish Gothic, arguing that there is indeed something distinctive and even exceptional about the Gothic as manifested in Scottish texts. Following on from the great early Gothic writers Ann Radcliffe and Mathew ‘Monk’ Lewis, Walter Scott and James Hogg were to adopt these conventions and translate them into a Scottish context. The mode’s key conventions were initiated by the publication in 1764 of the first self-proclaimed ‘Gothic story’, The Castle of Otranto by the English novelist, antiquarian and politician Horace Walpole. Scottish literature has had a lengthy and vigorous relationship with the Gothic mode. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |