Taking A Look At Gothic Literature

Throughout these lines, we intend to present typical Gothic elements of the homonymous novel, analyzing, discussing and comparing next the similar characteristics found in the detective story.

Gothic literature is the forerunner of detective fiction. The object of the present work is to explore, concisely, the evolution of detective fiction, starting from the Gothic genre, and their close connection, being the former the father of the suspense in fiction and detective stories.

For this aim, within the universal literature, one must start from a portrayal and definition of the literary genre that originated the Gothic novel and its subsequent evolution: explicit its historical development, from the Gothic tradition to detective fiction, reflecting

There is a characteristic of the detective novel that shares with its predecessor, the Gothic genre, and which several critics emphasize, as we will see in the following lines: the novel not only addresses the main theme but in its course, one can distinguish one or several secondary stories or themes. These keep a close relationship with the main idea and whose goal is to create a context through which the reader can feel him/herself trapped in(side) the plot and in some cases s/he may even be involved in the narrated fiction.

If we deal with its historical evolution, the first known samples of novels were produced in Greece and Rome between the 2nd century B. C. and III A. C. In these early narratives we can already find the development of the genre basic components (space, time, characters, settings, dialogues...). The medieval narrative offers, along with short stories, new models of a specific extension such as the chivalric and the sentimental novel. In the nineteenth century a rich production of writings appeared, starting from Romanticism: historic, poetic and social novels. It is with the Gothic where a parallelism is achieved, one that we can contrast with the later detective fiction: the treatment of the temporal sequence, the rupture of the history internal order, the analysis of the states and strata of consciousness and the unconsciousness, the interweaving of different language levels and the use of techniques taken from the cinema (parallel narration, flashback,