CONTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTURE

Contemporary Visual Culture

Contemporary Visual Culture

Introduction

In the eighteenth century, known as the Enlightenment, it was believed that man was able to explain everything by reason. The literature of these years is fraught with philosophical essays and novels of manners that reflect reality. However, in the last third of the century arose a new trend that will lay the foundations for the next Romanticism: this is the Gothic stories that include magical elements, ghostly horror, putting into question what is real and what not (Winter, 1992: 108).

The Gothic lasted from approximately 1765-1820, but almost all of the Romanticism of the nineteenth century authors turned their gaze to him, inspiring some of his most famous works. In the late nineteenth century with the advent of positivism, a scientific explanation for everything was promulgated. The works of gothic horror are also called ghost stories. The Gothic adjective is used because many of the stories were framed in medieval times, or the action took place in a castle, mansion or abbey of this architectural style. The intricacy of these, full of passages, dark hollow uninhabited rooms lent itself to create eerie environments (Levy, 1997: 64).

Facing sought irrational reason and, given the need to opt for new sources of inspiration and new audiences flocked to fear. In this endeavor, then picked up the inherited cultural baggage (and given a good dose of fantasy elements. Perhaps because of this, since its inception the Gothic novel has maintained a close relationship with the fantasy called genre. Many people argue that at the root of this whole genre 'can be traced to 1800' are, undoubtedly, to the Gothic literature that the same should be considered The Castle of Otranto(1764) as the first manifestation of the fantasy genre literary. The problem arises when establishing the true link between the two, because the point of view of that part to support this claim is indeed the great and does not take into account the richness and ambiguity that surround the Gothic novel Classical (Koenig, 1977: 17).

Broadly speaking we can say that this general reflection on the Gothic novel as the beginning of fantasy was based and still is based on the fact that this would be the first literary movement became aware, regarding wonderful or fantastic elements of the actual idea. Facing the literature wonderful (mythological narratives, romances or miracle stories) in which the element of transgression, which was seen as a miracle, was immersed in a world parallel to ours and governed by its own rules, experienced Gothic fiction a profound change that can only be explained under the century that develops. The second half of the eighteenth century was characterized by the philosophy of Neoclassicism Illustrated, by the absolute reign of the laws of science and a disproportionate cult of reason, that definitely would eventually impose rationalism as the only way of understanding and explanation of man and the world. The first consequence would not wait: the superstitions and miracles were contemplated as a transgression ...