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The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner

Decent Essays

The history of gothic literature is a discussion of how the classic gothic literature has morphed into today’s contemporary gothic literature. From the beginning days of gothic writing one of the main focuses has been on the issues that were relevant in the county or world at the time. Most people think of gothic writings as a scary story of gloom and doom, but there are many aspects that encompass a gothic writing. The true is that there are many elements to a gothic writing. The writer does not need to use all of them at the same time, but to use some of them to make it a gothic writing. As technology and the social atmosphere have evaluated writers have incorporated these elements into their writing. Gothic literature is said to have …show more content…

(Ringel) Mary Snodgrass points out, “Decades before Sigmund Freud provided a paradigm for the human psyche, echoes of disturbing behaviors forced readers of gothic literature to interpret subtexts of prejudice, classism, and abnormality in thought and action: in the motivation for James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” (Snodgrass) Many people of authority in America believed that the gothic genre was source of outside evil on the new world. This is supported by Reverend Enos Hitchcock’s Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, in which he “blames the corruption of young women in the new nation on “foreign writings and foreign manners” and prays “May this rising empire cease to import both the one and the other!” (Ringel) The 1800’s rang in a new era of writers and twist on the gothic style. One of the major contributors was Edgar Allan Poe with stories and poetry that still resonates with high schoolers to this day. Works that are still read or at the very least spoken of in high school are stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Noteworthy works by

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