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      Chapter

      Past and Present
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      Chapter

      Past and Present

      DOI link for Past and Present

      Past and Present book

      Past and Present

      DOI link for Past and Present

      Past and Present book

      ByMaggie Kilgour
      BookThe Rise of the Gothic Novel

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      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 1995
      Imprint Routledge
      Pages 6
      eBook ISBN 9781315003276
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      ABSTRACT

      Like Romanticism, the gothic is especially a revolt against a mechanistic or atomistic view of the world and relations, in favour of recovering an earlier organic model. The gothic is thus a nightmare vision of a modern world made up of detached individuals, which has dissolved into predatory and demonic relations which cannot be reconciled into a healthy social order. It shows the easy slide of the modern Cartesian mind from autonomy and independence into solipsism and obsession, depicting the atomistic individual as fragmented, and alienated from others and ultimately from himself. While the term gothic could thus be used to demonise the past as a dark age of feudal tyranny, it could also be used equally to idealise it as a golden age of innocent liberty. Its meaning was the territory for a political battle between the ancients and the moderns over the nature of the past and its relation to the present.

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