Gothic Literature

Art, as defined by Plato in his paradigmatic work The Republic, serves both as a definition qua definition - a way of telling us what art should be in and of itself - and as an exemplar of other aspects of society. Plato was fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the world and art (including all media of art) because he argued passionately that the true purpose of literature was a mimetic one. Art should, in other worlds, imitate life in all things and as closely as possible. (Aristotle, one of Plato's students, would extend this idea of Plato's even farther.) This paper examines how Plato's understanding of the form and function of art can help us to situate the epistemological stance of Gothic Victorian literature - a set of literary endeavors that was also deeply committed to the mimetic, although not precisely in the way that Plato...
[ View Full Essay]