Violence In Gothic Literature During The Nineteenth-Century

During history many forms of violence have been featured in the fictional surroundings of a horror story.
A horror story is a tale that is created with the intent of inducing a feeling of fear. These tales can be traced back to ancient origins and have come to influence a considerable amount of folk literature. Since the twenthieth-century, violence has become a popular form of literature exhiting the the universal violence of modern society.

Horror stories themselves can feature supernatural elements such as witches, werewolves, or they can confront the more realistic psychological fears. Productively, in western literature had its own culture with its own fears and curiosities, the Gothic novel, began to emerge in the 18th century. The era is mainly known as the pre-romantic era. This genre was first
introduced by Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto (1765) that many believed helped the genre become a legitimate literary form. Nearly a century later Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley introduced pseudoscience into the genre in her famous novel Frankenstein (1818), about the creation of a monster that ultimately destroys its creator.

During the twentieth-century literature established itself by demonstrating the universal violence of modern society.
From the destruction caused by large-scale warfare to separate cases of murder, rape, and abuse. Critics of modern literature have predominantly attributed this trend to either the graphic appeal of violent behavior and its likeness to unsettling readers by unnerving their individual beliefs. Others have emphasized the historical implications of violence during the eras succeeding World War II, were poets and novelists predominantly conveyed the anxieties of a world that seemed unable to obtain long-term peace, and in which human levels of aggressiveness could result in global destruction. By the end of the twentieth century, images of violence occurring in all forms of media had become a normality of everyday life that the destructive potential of the human race seemed a given, ensuring moral solutions to the problem seem improbable. Consequently, violence has become a subject that most modern writers desire to write; to convey the historical, psychological, and artistic landscape of the modern world, so the most could not fail to
confront.

For most of the twentieth-century poets, violence was an unavoidable reality that permeated their works. Critics have examined in the writings of Hart Crane the central imagery of destruction as it expresses the poet's inability to accept a deeply flawed world. In the poetry of Sylvia Plath and John Wain an attempt to perceive the sources and effects of modern violence ending in anger, frustration, despair, and, in the case of Plath, suicide. To conclude, critics have come to acknowledge that the postwar poet had the responsibility to study the nature of violence so people could ultimately understand and avoid similar happenings in the future. Instances of the form of violence being expressed in literature include, George Orwell’s 1949 novel: 1984, and Hart Crane’s 1930 peotry: The Bridge.