American Studies Commons^™

A Place For Poe: The Foreign In Two Tales Of The Gothic, Shelby Spears

English Class Publications

There are certain words we use so often in life that they begin to lose their meaning—buzzwords, or broad categorical ones, like millennial. These words, too, crop up in literature: Here I would like to explore one of these in particular, Gothic. We talk often of Gothic literature, Gothic writers, Gothic horror, Gothic post-core triphop—but our definition is so often fuzzy. We know that to be Gothic means to be scary, to be full of the strange and terrifying, but where exactly do we draw the line between Gothic and other forms of horror fiction? Is Stephen King Gothic? Is …