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    Extract From Fred Botting

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    Janie-Maree Doolan
    The Enlightenment both produced and reinvented the Gothic. The neoclassical values of the 18th century British society came from a conscious recovery of Greek and Roman ideas. Anything that didn't conform to neoclassical tastes, like architecture and writing, was referred to derogatorily as "Gothic" and seen as lacking reason, morality, and beauty. The projection of the Gothic past occurred as part of wider political, economic, and social upheaval during the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, when ideas about nature, art, and subjectivity were also being reassessed.

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    Extract From Fred Botting

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    Janie-Maree Doolan
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    The Enlightenment both produced and reinvented the Gothic. The neoclassical values of the 18th century British society came from a conscious recovery of Greek and Roman ideas. Anything that didn't conform to neoclassical tastes, like architecture and writing, was referred to derogatorily as "Gothic" and seen as lacking reason, morality, and beauty. The projection of the Gothic past occurred as part of wider political, economic, and social upheaval during the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, when ideas about nature, art, and subjectivity were also being reassessed.

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    Extract from Fred Botting

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    The Enlightenment both produced and reinvented the Gothic. The neoclassical values of the 18th century British society came from a conscious recovery of Greek and Roman ideas. Anything that didn't conform to neoclassical tastes, like architecture and writing, was referred to derogatorily as "Gothic" and seen as lacking reason, morality, and beauty. The projection of the Gothic past occurred as part of wider political, economic, and social upheaval during the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, when ideas about nature, art, and subjectivity were also being reassessed.

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    71 views1 page

    Extract From Fred Botting

    Uploaded by

    Janie-Maree Doolan
    The Enlightenment both produced and reinvented the Gothic. The neoclassical values of the 18th century British society came from a conscious recovery of Greek and Roman ideas. Anything that didn't conform to neoclassical tastes, like architecture and writing, was referred to derogatorily as "Gothic" and seen as lacking reason, morality, and beauty. The projection of the Gothic past occurred as part of wider political, economic, and social upheaval during the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, when ideas about nature, art, and subjectivity were also being reassessed.

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    You might find these comments by an eminent scholar of the Gothic helpful for further

    understanding…

    “The Enlightenment, which produced the maxims and models of modern culture,
    also invented the Gothic. Moreover, the Enlightenment can itself be considered a
    reinvention, in the sense that the neoclassical values dominating British society in
    the eighteenth century constituted a conscious recovery and redeployment of ideas
    gleaned from Greek and Roman writers. After the Renaissance, the classical tradition
    was associated with civilised, humane and polite civic culture, its moral and aesthetic
    values privileged as the basis of virtuous behaviour, harmonious social relations and
    mature artistic practices. Eighteenth-century writers liked to refer to their present as
    ‘modern’ and thus distinct from both a classical antiquity appreciated in its historical
    continuity and a feudal past regarded as a barbaric and primitive stage, the
    dominance of which had been discontinued. Such an overarching remodelling of
    cultural values required an extensive rewriting of history.

    Here, the word ‘Gothic’ assumes its powerful, if negative, significance: it condenses a
    variety of historical elements and meanings opposed to the categories valued in the
    eighteenth century. In this respect, ‘the real history of “Gothic” begins with the
    eighteenth century’, when it signified a ‘barbarous', ‘medieval’ and ‘supernatural’ past
    (Longueil, 1923, 453–4). Used derogatively about art, architecture and writing that
    failed to conform to the standards of neoclassical taste, ‘Gothic’ signified the lack of
    reason, morality and beauty of feudal beliefs, customs and works. The projection of
    the present onto a Gothic past occurred, however, as part of the wider processes of
    political, economic and social upheaval: emerging at a time of bourgeois and
    industrial revolution, a time of Enlightenment philosophy and increasingly secular
    views, the eighteenth century Gothic fascination with a past of chivalry, violence,
    magical beings and malevolent aristocrats is bound up with the shifts from feudal to
    commercial practices in which notions of property, government and society were
    undergoing massive transformations. Along with these shifts, ideas about nature, art
    and subjectivity were also reassessed. ‘Gothic’ thus resonates as much with anxieties
    and fears concerning the crises and changes in the present as with any terrors of the
    past.”

    Fred Botting, ‘In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture’, A Companion to the
    Gothic, ed David Punter, Blackwell: Oxford & London, p. 13.

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