The Gothic Revival (English)

From the architectural taste for slender forms, Gothic also arouses a literary interest, both to oppose Reason, typical of the Renaissance period and to meet the new literary tastes of the time. Four novels have been analyzed, in chronological order: the first (as an attempt to break away from tradition), two novels at the peak of the literary genre, and the last, analyzing their similarities and differences.
The interest in Gothic was born in the middle of the Renaissance. Perhaps to oppose reason and rationalism or to look for something new, first in architecture and then in literature an ancient, obscure term is “dusted off”, which evoked something mysterious. Gothic, indeed. Interest that takes hold thanks to the birth of the concepts of Sublime and Picturesque, involving the senses and emotions.
Important contribution was also given by the paintings of Piranesi, to which Walpole, the first novelist taken into consideration, became passionate, so much as to transform his home into a “Gothic museum”. The first literary attempt shows an attachment to the Augustan era, with chivalrous reminiscences, a rediscovered manuscript and the work divided into five chapters like the acts of Greek tragedies.
The other novels are more daring, with narrative techniques that improve – such as “stories within stories” – and with an ever clearer detachment from the Roman Catholic Church, seen by some authors as based on suffering, on external appearance and associated with Inquisition. The last book represents the journey par excellence, through the figure of the Wandering Jew, forced to wander and tell his story, in a fatal clash between Culture and Nature.