Compare and contrast thre enineteenth century short stories commenting on the author's use of gothic genre conventions of horror and the supernatural.

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Chris Currie 11 Temple

Compare and contrast three

nineteenth century short

stories commenting on the

author’s use of gothic genre

conventions of horror and the

supernatural

The three short stories that I have chosen to compare and contrast are: The Signalman by Charles Dickens, An Arrest by Ambrose Bearcy and Napoleon and the Spectre by Charlotte Brontë. All these stories were completed by the mid to late eighteenth hundreds.

The Signalman is set by a railway in Britain, along a lonely stretch of a railway line in a steep cutting. An Arrest is set in America and for the most part in a forest. Napoleon and the Spectre is set in Paris.

Gothic genre was one of the leading and most used genres of the nineteenth century and this genre is very prevalent in all three of the stories that I have chosen. The gothic genre originated from South America in the seventeenth century and the idea of it is to add certain characteristics to the story that alienate and distinguish a section of a story form the rest of the novel making it feel and sound more eerie. Gothic novels tended to contain a supernatural element in them. This probably due to the Victorian fascination with the paranormal, as a reaction to the technological advances of the past century, which had denied the existence of such a phenomenon. There was growth of religious fervour at the time, which helped to admiss the existence of ghosts and the like.

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The very setting of The Signalman form the start gives the story an eerie gothic feel to it with the signalman working and living in a dark lonely place with the tunnel that is very close by adding to the sense of mystery of the man and the place. The railway line is set in a shallow gorge with ‘dripping wet walls of jagged stone,’ which gives the sense that the jagged stone is evil and the dripping sense is forbidding and would probably echo in the tunnel adding further to the forbidding sense. This setting partially occurs in ...

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