ABSTRACT
The study of the horror genre is an interdisciplinary, ever-growing field that adds more interests and disciplines with each passing day. Often relegated to the realm of popular culture and film studies, horror studies is a field that is crystallizing before our eyes. This chapter is an attempt to find a middle ground between popular studies of the horror genre and academic examinations of the aesthetics of horror. This chapter is a survey of prominent discourses over the horror genre in order to explore how horror has been discussed, historically, and how the genre can contribute to an academic conversation over aesthetics of the terrifying. Those who study horror explore how the genre is a sociological representation of the taboos, the fears, and the anxieties of a world in transition. Perhaps no other time period witnessed the stratospheric transition that played out in the Victorian period. Scholars who examine the artifacts of nineteenth-century Britain, the novel, argue that the realistic depiction of everyday lived experience allowed Victorian authors a documentary method of capturing a world in flux. This chapter surveys how the horror genre and the Victorian novel were two forms adequate to capture the terrifying world of transition.
