G#$@!% ?

With all this talk about Gothic, both in literature and in the mainstream, I began to wonder about its origins. While doing some research on Gothic literature, I was reading an article by an author, Jerrold Hogle, who says that the term Gothic was basically started as a derogatory term to describe a certain type of architecture. I’ll quote him directly because, even though his explanation is lengthy, he puts it well:

…’Gothic’ has been quite deliberately fraudulent and shifty every since the term was first used to describe a medieval architectural style, and, from there, a vaguely medieval way of life more or less connected to that style. ‘Gothic’ was invented as a pejorative descriptor by Italian art historians of the fifteenth century to associate the pointed-arch and castellated modes of architecture from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries with the northern Germanic tribes of ‘Goths’ or ‘Visigoths’ who helped decimate imperial Rome, the classical styles of which these Italian scholar-artists were working to revalue and restore partly by describing intervening styles as less civilized, and, in the case of the ‘Gothic’, as downright ‘rustic.’ (2)

If this is true—that the term Gothic was used in a biased way that intended to put down the architectural style of the Visigoths—then I find it quite interesting that the term would come to describe a type of literature which has as one of its main elements the critiquing of what’s wrong in the particular society from which it springs.

Source:

Hogle, Jerrold E. “Gothic Studies Past, Present, and Future.” Gothic Studies 1.1 (1999): 1-135. MLA. OCLC. Seton Hall University. 21 Apr. 2008.

~ by courtneekirax on April 28, 2008.