‘Thrilled with Chilly Horror’: A Formulaic Pattern in Gothic Fiction

• Authors: Manuel Aguirre
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article is part of a body of research into the conventions which govern the composition of Gothic texts. Gothic fiction resorts to formulas or formula-like constructions, but whereas in writers such as Ann Radcliffe this practice is apt to be masked by stylistic devices, it enjoys a more naked display in the–in our modern eyes–less ‘canonical’ Gothics, and it is in these that we may profitably begin an analysis. The novel selected was Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer (1794)–a very free translation of K. F. Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1792) and one of the seven Gothic novels mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. There is currently no literature on the topic of formulaic language in Gothic prose fiction. The article resorts to a modified understanding of the term ‘collocation’ as used in lexicography and corpus linguistics to identify the significant co-occurrence of two or more words in proximity. It also draws on insights from the Theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition, in particular as concerns the use of the term ‘formula’ in traditional epic poetry, though again some modifications are required by the nature of Teuthold’s text. The article differentiates between formula as a set of words which appear in invariant or near-invariant collocation more than once, and a formulaic pattern, a rather more complex, open system of collocations involving lexical and other fields. The article isolates a formulaic pattern-that gravitating around the node-word ‘horror’, a key word for the entire Gothic genre –, defines its component elements and structure within the book, and analyses its thematic importance. Key to this analysis are the concepts of overpatterning, ritualization, equivalence and visibility.

Keywords

EN

collocation; equivalence; field; formula; formulaic pattern; Gothic fiction; horror; overpatterning; ritualization; visibility

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 49
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 105-123

Dates

online

2015-01-29

Contributors

author

Manuel Aguirre

• Independent Scholar

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/stap-2014-0010