Crumbling Structures and Contaminated Narratives: Genre and the Gothic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter examines certain Gothic texts such as The Castle of Otranto (Walpole 1764), Frankenstein (Shelley 1818), Dracula (Stoker 1897), and Wuthering Heights (Bronte 1847) within the generic framework that has traditionally determined the parameters of Gothic representation and discusses the extent to which these parameters have been destabilized post-eighteenth century. Critically engaging with conceptualizations of the Gothic as a mutable and unfixed form, the chapter argues that this generic destabilization is not only a consequence of the Gothic's appearance in more contemporary contexts, but also as a consequence of the Gothic's emergence in such specific locations as America, or the South. Keywords: Genre, Mode, Imitative Arts, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Law and Counter Law The Gothic, as a category of representation, tends to evoke a loose assortment of images, themes, and narrative conventions associated with its presence in various textual or cultural contexts. How these conventions, themes, and images are understood is often determined by qualifying terms that designate particular types of Gothic according to their engagement with a number of factors including certain historical periods (such as Victorian Gothic), specific cultural milieus (such as suburban Gothic), or particular national and regional narratives (such as Australian Gothic, Scottish Gothic, Canadian Gothic, New England Gothic, Caribbean Gothic and Maori Gothic). In such instances, where the Gothic is adapted to particular environs or eras, its connection to its original form is loosened, with new variations on classical ideas establishing themselves in reinterpreted Gothic landscapes. Such is the case with the American Gothic. In Gothic America , Teresa Goddu notes that inquiries into the defining characteristics of the Gothic become confused when accompanied by the modifier “American” since in an American context the Gothic lacks the self-evident validity and qualifying imagery of its British counterpart (1997, 3). Indeed, the British Gothic, which allegedly emerged in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto , drew on themes and imagery far removed from an American setting. Medieval in its iconography, Walpole's novel was driven by themes of cursed heritage, ancestral haunting, decay, entrapment, and architectural dereliction, providing the foundation for a Gothic style that subsequent works of popular Gothic fiction such as Frankenstein or Dracula faithfully maintained and emulated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.043 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".