Victor A. Finogenov, Junior Researcher, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nakhimovsky Avenue, 51/21, 117418, Moscow, Russia.
The article examines Gothic motifs in the works of Heinrich von Kleist, both on the internal and external levels. The Gothic view of the world as a space of chaos, where a series of random catastrophic events occur, in the face of which a person becomes numb with horror, becomes one of the recurring motifs of the writer’s entire work. Having borrowed many images from the works of the Gothic movement, primarily “The Monk” by M.G. Lewis, Kleist hyperbolizes them and uses them in a parodic manner. Kleist’s Gothic aesthetics is strongly associated with irony and black humor, which allow the author to take a detached playful position in relation to his works and the reader; this ideologically brings Kleist closer to Jena romanticism.
Heinrich von Kleist; Matthew Gregory Lewis; Gothic literature; tragedy; horror; romanticism; parody; romantic irony.
20.04.2024
15.05.2024
Finogenov, V.A. “Gothic Horror as a Component of Heinrich von Kleist’s Romantic Irony”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 3(65), 2024, pp. 37–55. (In Russ.)
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