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Yonjae JungOver the past two decades, the genre of Gothic fiction has been the subject of renewed critical interest. Gothic fiction can be roughly defined as a form of narrative which tends to produce terror in the reader, and refuses to conform to realist mode of representation in fiction writing. In the American context of a different history and landscape, the British Gothic mode seems to be highly inappropriate to the new world realities. Despite the lack of a medieval past and the aristocratic relics, however, the Gothic has flourished in the United States and found an enthusiastic readership in the burgeoning literary market. As several critics have noted, the rise of the Gothic in America is enabled by imitating earlier European achievements. But, what should be noted is that the American Gothic style is significantly different from that of the classical English Gothic. From the earliest period of American Gothicism, Poe and other American writers have explored and developed their own unique Gothic themes such as the Puritan inheritance, the pathology of guilt, the frontier experience, the political anxieties about democracy, the American South, the aberrant psychological states, and racial issues. Indeed, the use of the Gothic imagination is a more significant and predominant part of American literature than is generally thought. As Leslie Fiedler claims, the large corpus of American fiction is unquestionably Gothic. In this paper, I intent to contextualize the historical development of the nineteenth-century American Gothic as a major aesthetic impetus, focusing especially on Poe's work. In so doing, I will demonstrate that the American Gothic is not an outmoded offshoot of the British tradition, but rather an original and experimental literature with innovative energy.
