Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures | Ronald R. Thomas (Essay Date 1990)
RONALD R. THOMAS (ESSAY DATE 1990)
SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. "Recovering Nightmares: Nineteenth-Century Gothic." In Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, pp. 71-81. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.
In the following excerpt, Thomas focuses on the relationship between dreams and Gothic literature, in terms of psychology as well as narrative style.
It is within the experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms, has been more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of the disease.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
The high esteem in which dream-life is held by some schools of philosophy … is clearly an echo of the divine nature of dreams which was undisputed in antiquity…. For attempts at giving a...
[The entire page is 5530 words long]
Navigate
