Free English Literature Dissertations - 3 Review Of The Literature Freud’s Psychoanalytic Approach Is One Of The
3 Review of the literature
Freud’s psychoanalytic approach is one of the major psychological approaches for explanation of the emergence of modern day horror from nineteenth-century gothic1, despite the fact that such critics as Erwin, Macmillan, Grunbaum and Cioffi challenge the scientific nature of this approach and its applicability to the analysis of horror2. Investigating psychoanalysis and horror films, Carroll claims that the psychoanalytic account is not comprehensive for the genre3. Even if Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is proved unscientific, it still provides valid explanation to the phenomenon of horror in literature and films. As the theme of gothic and modern day horror attracts much attention from the side of critics, many critical works are written on this issue, although they provide rather controversial findings. According to MacAndrew, gothic novels of the nineteenth century are closely connected with sentimental literature of the eighteenth century that was aimed at evoking sympathy and pity in readers.
Thus, MacAndrew considers that gothic literature reflects a certain level of psychological complexity and gives shape to concepts of the place of evil in the human mind4. The researcher states that the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries were the start of people’s obsession with the analysis of the unconscious and the inner self; as MacAndrew claims in regard to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Walpole was able to present his age’s concept of human evil pride, hatred, violence, cruelty, incest as part of man’s psychology5. Analysing early gothic romances, Howard Philips Lovecraft regards Horace Walpole as the initiator of the gothic genre, but the researcher further claims that gothic novels are improved and complicated by such writers as Ann Radcliff and Edgar Allan Poe who manage to create the element of ‘cosmic-terror’ in their narratives6. However, the researcher Linda Bayer-Berenbaum challenges Lovecraft’s view, pointing at the fact that Walpole and Radcliffe establish traditional elements of gothic romances in their works The Castle of Otranto and The Italian7. Bayer-Berenbaum considers that through gothic elements of these novels the writers uncover the unconscious in people and simultaneously reveal social reality.
Contrary to a rather negative perception of The Castle of Otranto by eighteenth-century critics, Walpole’s gothic novel was praised by such Romantic poets and writers as George Byron, Walter Scott and Friderich Schiller. In view of such contradictory visions, a further analysis makes an attempt to overcome these controversies and investigate in depth the changes in gothic styles with the spread of psychoanalysis.
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