Horror literature

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Scary walls as a symbol of horror literature (house of William Wordsworth in Rydal Mount )

The horror literature ( English gothic fiction ) or the horror novel (English gothic novel ) is a literary genre of fantasy that emerged in England in the mid-18th century and flourished at the beginning of the 19th century.

At the end of the 18th century, the supernatural and unconventional that had been repressed by the rationality of the Enlightenment were taken up again in English literature in the form of the horror novel . In the process, the horror became a consciously created aesthetic commodity that was easy to sell. The creation was mainly based on rules that were based on Burke's theory of the sublime and literary models such as the Jacobean drama or the medieval romance .

The English horror novel

Melmoth the Wanderer , title page of the first edition from 1820

With The Castle of Otranto , Horace Walpole wrote the first gothic novel in 1764 , thus establishing a new genre that enjoyed enormous popularity from the second half of the 18th century . The name for this new genre was the subtitle of Walpole's horror novel A Gothic Story . While in Walpole's novel scary events like the giant helmet falling from the sky still looked comparatively ridiculous, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis ' infamous novel The Monk with its orgy of sadistic and sexual fantasies finally created a new genre, which, in a trivialized and coarsened form, became the dominant form of literature at the beginning of the 19th century. Already in Lewis' novel there are thrills like incest or decaying corpses, which are supposed to satisfy the sensationalism of the readership. Charles Robert Maturin concluded the development of this genre in the narrower sense in 1820 with his monumental, 600-page story Melmoth the Wanderer , whose protagonist, the eternally restless wanderer Melmoth, made a Faustian pact with the devil and bequeathed his soul to him. to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, but now looking in vain for an unfortunate person who is willing to trade with him.

Richard Hurd described the new literary direction in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance as "gothic romance" , in which he found something that was "particularly appropriate to the point of view of a genius and the purpose of poetry". He backed up his praise with an example from architecture :

“When an architect judges a Gothic building by Greek rules , he finds nothing but shapelessness. But Gothic architecture has its own rules, and if you examine it for these, you will find that it has its own qualities, just like Greek architecture. "

The rise of horror literature is closely related to an expansion of the concept of aesthetics , which since Joseph Addison's Spectator essay about “Imagination” has discovered, on the one hand, the different varieties of nature and their effect on people , and on the other, their dangerous and eerie sides. The expanded aesthetic therefore no longer relates solely to the Arcadian landscape, but also to the gloomy and the sublime .

The theoretical pioneering work for this paradigm shift was mainly done by Edmund Burke with his book A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1747). For horror literature, the dark and sublime is also decisive in the sense that the conception of man no longer only focuses on the side of reason, balanced social behavior and an aesthetic expression that belongs to them, but also the irrational, gloomy and destructive Traits of the ego, so that a hitherto unknown soul landscape arises in the tension between man, nature and culture, an artistic-literary exemplification of the “dialectic of the Enlightenment” avant la lettre . With Burke, the terrible as the reason for the sublime has a more aesthetic quality of reception . The sublime is a matter of artistic, here literary representation, which works with aesthetic distance. Too mimetic representation disturb the reception. According to Burke, the feeling of the sublime (with the reader) only arises when the terrible does not move too close (" does not press too nearly. ").

The foreign, threatening space is accordingly mostly relocated to Germany or Italy in the classic English horror novel. The Catholic Church appears - in line with the Enlightenment tradition of criticism of religion - as a refuge of oppression and superstition or perversion. The classic design elements of the gothic novel include the heroic struggle for the liberation of a beautiful, innocent heroine who has fallen into the clutches of an evil tormentor, the plot's structure of escape and persecution, underground prisons, dungeons and tombs or vaults as well as the horrific , terrifying experiences of inexplicable events or gruesome phenomena, such as black masses or threatening natural phenomena, and encounters with eerie or supernatural figures such as mysterious strangers, doppelgangers or seemingly dead people.

Equally, night, persecution and incantation scenes and artfully delayed courses of action with multiple effects of tension and surprise create a world that eludes the access to causal explanatory models or ultimately turns out to be mystification .

Death, decay and gloomy, sublime landscapes, especially with Radcliffe, also provide motifs and design elements for staging the horror, which is increasingly shifted from the outside to the inside or the soul. The linguistic design of fear and frightfulness or horror is further developed in gothic romance up to the border areas of the pathological in order to linguistically penetrate and develop the extreme feelings. This is also the real achievement of the horror novel: The reader takes part in the torment of the soul of the female or male main character and their fears of death, rape, the completely unknown or - worse still - their own guilt. Although the cause of the horror is often explained rationally in retrospect, the weighting of the text is still clear.

Well-known representatives of Anglo-Saxon horror literature are (in chronological order with their main works):

Frankenstein , Volume 1, title page of the first edition from 1818
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , title page of the 1886 edition

By 1825 the heyday of the gothic novel was over. The influence of the horror novel on English narrative literature of the 19th century was, however, lasting. After the end of the fashion trend in the 1820s, the versatility of the horror novel repertoire became evident for a wide range of other literary areas or genres such as science fiction , detective novels or social novels. Psychologizing romance and fantasy also repeatedly resort to gothic romance design tools in their attempts to explore new areas of experience.

As an offshoot of the romantic romanticism, Mary Shelley's story Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) had an extraordinary effect . Shelley's story of the scientist Viktor Frankenstein, who plunged himself into his own misfortune with the creation of an unbearably ugly person, thus an android , has developed into a myth that can be called up at any time up to the present day . The symbol of the creator Frankenstein designed in Shelley's novel, who is destructively chained to his creature, the monster, exemplifies the dialectic of utopia and catastrophe and thus becomes the literary prototype for the representation of the inescapable tragedy of the scientific-utopian Acting. The dream of self-redemption creates monsters, suffering and excruciating guilt; Using the design materials of gothic romance , Shelley developed the model for the progress-critical branch of science fiction.

In contrast to the classic horror novel, Shelley relativizes the common good-bad scheme in her work: the modern Prometheus bears part of the guilt, while his vengeful creature not only arouses feelings of revulsion, but also arouses sympathy in the reader due to its suffering. The monster as the aggressor turns out to be a victim; the tormented victim Frankenstein turns out to be at least partly an aggressor as well.

Perpetrator and victim can hardly be separated any more; In the fully developed horror novel, the events are psychologized and thus the validity of the reader's sympathy control according to the law of poetic justice is abolished. The perspective form of representation with its connection of the stories of the polar explorer Watson, the chemist Frankenstein and the monster, together with the thematic variety, opens a wide field of literary meaning: Frankenstein is not only a modern myth and a science-fiction story critical of science, but also at the same time a literary study of the social causes of evil in Rousseau's sense . The monster's murderous acts lie in its desperation over the constant rejections it receives from society for its ugliness. Morality is based on the satisfaction of elementary needs, which also include love: If this is denied, the pent-up frustration turns into aggression.

The torments that creator and creature inflict on each other in their tragic chain are presented so broadly in Shelley's novel that Frankenstein becomes the literary panorama and soul drama of the lonely suffering person in general. At the same time, Shelley's novel, as a moral lesson, warns of the dangers of human self-overestimation: The boundless curiosity and the unlimited thirst for knowledge are the work of the devil; The novel expressly emphasizes the control of what is feasible and the renunciation of responsibility. The Frankenstein myth of the dangerous homunculus and the return of the repressed, created by Shelley, finds its way into the symbolic world of subsequent social and utopia-critical literature as a deterrent warning image.

Numerous motifs of the horror novel were also taken up by romantic literature. The horror romanticism or black romanticism emerged .

The ability of the horror repertoire to help express dark passions and the unconscious is equally evident in the novels by Charlotte and Emily Brontë or in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . Exploding feelings of hatred, love or hidden sexuality in connection with a violent atmosphere in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre or Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights point back to the unleashed passions of the horror novel, whose Gothic apparatus is, however, parodically undermined at the same time .

For example, in Jane Eyre Rochester asks the excited women not to “tear him down or strangle him”. Likewise, the conventional emotional stereotypes of the gothic novel are broken in the taming and transformation of the aristocratic seducer in Charlotte Brontë's novel: Jane hates herself when she follows her conscience and not her physical desire. Occasionally, Charlotte Brontë's protagonist also takes on the role of the terrifying heroine, who initially felt great fear during the Rochester arson attack because of the strange and threatening sensory impressions.

The moral good-evil scheme of the classic horror novel is used in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adopted in a psychologized form. The socially successful Dr. Jekyll actually has a double identity and can transform himself into his hidden, evil and terrible part - Mr. Hyde - with the help of a chemical drug. In Stevenson's allegorical variant of the horror novel, the old battle between good and bestial nature is decided in favor of evil in a modern world that is split between science on the one hand and the nocturnal city and crime on the other. The structure of the story is based on the pattern of the detective novel: The mystery of the murder only dissolves after the identity of Mr. Hyde has been discovered and the final confession has been made.

In contrast, authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins were at the beginning of the development of the detective novel , which, in its form as a mystery thriller , draws just as much on motifs from the horror novel. The development of modern horror literature with representatives such as HP Lovecraft or Stephen King moved in a third direction .

Representative in Germany

In the German-speaking world, the following works are of particular importance for horror literature: Christian Heinrich Spieß ' Das Petermännchen (1791–1792), Heinrich von Kleist's Das Bettelweib von Locarno (1797), Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (1797), Der Runenberg ( 1804), Achim von Arnims Die Majoratsherren (1819), Adelbert von Chamissos Peter Schlemihl's miraculous story (1814) and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqués Undine (1811). In addition, ETA Hoffmann with The Elixirs of the Devil (1815) and his night pieces , including The Sandman (1817), as well as Joseph von Eichendorff with The Marble Picture (1818).

See also

literature

  • Christopher Frayling : Nightmare. The birth of horror. BBC Books, London 1996, ISBN 0-563-37198-6 . (German: Nightmares. The origins of horror. Vgs, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-8025-2303-2 .)
  • Jürgen Klein : The Gothic novel and the aesthetics of evil. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1975, ISBN 3-534-06858-0 . (= Impulses from research 20)
  • Jürgen Klein: Beginnings of the English Romanticism 1740 - 1780. Heidelberg lectures . Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 1986, ISBN 3-533-03825-4 .
  • Jürgen Klein: Black romance . Peter Lang, Bern / Frankfurt / New York 2005, ISBN 3-631-38977-9 .
  • Jürgen Klein / Gunda Kuttler: Mathematics of Desire. Shoebox House, Hamburg 2011.
  • Jan CL König: Creation of horror. Effect aesthetics and emotional-cognitive reception of horror films and literature. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2005, ISBN 3-631-54675-0 .
  • HP Lovecraft : The Literature of Fear. To the story of the fantastic. (= Fantastic Library 320 = Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch 2422) Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38922-X . (Original English edition: Supernatural Horror in Literature. Online text )
  • Dirk Sangmeister: Ten theses on the production, reception and research of the horror novel around 1800. In: Lichtenberg yearbook. 2010, ISBN 978-3-8253-7320-7 , pp. 177-217.
  • Wolfgang Trautwein: Exquisite fear. Horror literature in the 18th and 19th centuries. Systematic outline, studies on Bürger, Maturin, Hoffmann, Poe and Maupassant. Hanser, Munich et al. 1980, ISBN 3-446-12987-1 . (At the same time: Diss., Stuttgart 1979: Schauerliteratur 1765–1915. )
  • Ingeborg Weber: The English horror novel. An introduction. Artemis, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-7608-1307-0 . (= Artemis introductions 7)
  • Gero von Wilpert : The German ghost story. Motif, form, development (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 406). Kröner, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-520-40601-2 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Schauerroman  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Wiktionary: Schauerliteratur  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270-273, here p. 270.
  2. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270-273, here p. 270.
  3. ↑ In the original: "[...] something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry" and "[...] when an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules, he finds nothing but deformity . But the Gothic architecture has it's own rules, by which, when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have it's merit, as well as the Grecian. " In: Richard Hurd: Letters on Chivalry and Romance. Edited by Edith J. Morley. London 1911, pp. 81 and 118.
  4. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270–273, here p. 270. See also Heike Gfrereis (Ed.): Lexikon literaturwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe . Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 978-3-476-10320-8 , pp. 73 f.
  5. ↑ See Heike Gfrereis (Hrsg.): Lexicon of literary scientific basic concepts . Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 978-3-476-10320-8 , pp. 73 f.
  6. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270–273, here p. 270. See also Heike Gfrereis (Ed.): Lexikon literaturwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe . Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 978-3-476-10320-8 , pp. 73 f.
  7. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270-273, here pp. 270 f.
  8. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270-273, here pp. 271 f.
  9. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270-273, here pp. 272 ​​f.
  10. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber: The Schauerroman . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 270-273, here p. 273.