xvi Introduction appearance. I don’t believe that any text is ever of just one genre, or that a writer has only one intent in mind when writing a work. I tend to agree with Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell, who wrote, “As soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity,” 8 and that “every text par- ticipates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.” 9 A horror text can be many things: romance horror, science fi ction horror, edifying horror, and so on. If the narrative has horrifi c content or evokes fear, on whatever level, then I’ve included that narrative in this work. American and British Horror Literature Before the Twentieth Century After “why” and “how” comes “what.” What is horror literature? Its origins lie centuries earlier than the twentieth century, so it is necessary to describe briefl y what came before in order to provide context to what follows. How- ever, a history of horror literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would fi ll a book the size of this one, so what follows here is perforce going to be painfully brief. The impulse to frighten readers has been present in texts as far back as the works of the classical Greeks and Romans, 10 if not the Bible 11 and before it the “Epic of Gilgamesh” (approx. 2100 BCE). But modern horror literature began in the 1670s: In the central years of the reign of Charles II lies a curious group of English plays. Written and performed in the 1670s, these plays are characterised by a cynical and unrelenting depiction of evil, violence, an insatiable human drive for power, and an explicit absence of providential justice or moral absolutes . . . it is now generally acknowledged that they form their own category, as coined by Robert D. Hume: the “horror” or the “blood- and-torture villain” tragedies. 12 These Restoration horror plays were infl uenced by the Jacobean revenge trag- edies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but presented an amoral universe in stark opposition to the world of “regeneration through violence” 13 portrayed in the revenge tragedies. Moreover, the intent of the authors of the Restoration horror plays was to horrify and shock the viewer, rather than to both titillate and edify them, as was the case with the authors of the revenge tragedies. Both the content of the plays and the intention of the authors set the Restoration horror plays apart from their predecessors and presented audiences with the fi rst modern horror narratives. Five decades later, a new genre of poetry appeared—“graveyard poetry”— which began with Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” (1721) and
Previous Page Next Page