"Awful apprehension" och "sickening realization"
Om begreppen "terror" och "horror" i den gotiska litteraturen
Edmund BurkeHorrorTerrorSkräckDet sublimaAnn RadcliffeMatthew LewisGotikExcessDet outsagdaAvsmakThe MonkThe Italian
Gothic literature has a tradition of dealing with dark subjects, themes and motifs, as well as depicting fear in different shapes and forms. Dani Cavallaro describes dark fiction in terms of the "aesthetic of the unwelcome". The philosopher Edmund Burke separates the beautiful from the sublime and writes that everything that is capable of producing a terror of pain and death is a source of the sublime. In her essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry", Ann Radcliffe draws a clear line between the concepts of terror and horror and distinguished them as fundamentally different. In this essay, I define the terms horror and terror by following up the research surrounding Radcliffes statement. I begin with the concept of terror that Burke and other writers define as an elevated and positive feeling, then move on to account for the discussion surrounding Matthew Lewis' novel The Monk. It was considered pornographic, lewd and outright dangerous in its obscenity with blatant depictions of violence, gore and sex. Since Radcliffe and Lewis were contemporary I reckon that it is profitable to explore this tension further in my essay. From Radcliffe and Lewis I find out how the concepts of terror and horror have developed with time and how modern theorists conceive this distinction.