"Thrilled with chilly horror": A formulaic pattern in Gothic fiction
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Date
2014
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
This article is part of a body of research into the conventions which govern the composition of
Gothic texts. Gothic fiction resorts to formulas or formula-like constructions, but whereas in
writers such as Ann Radcliffe this practice is apt to be masked by stylistic devices, it enjoys a
more naked display in the – in our modern eyes – less ‘canonical’ Gothics, and it is in these that
we may profitably begin an analysis. The novel selected was Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer
(1794) – a very free translation of K. F. Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1792) and one of the seven
Gothic novels mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
There is currently no literature on the topic of formulaic language in Gothic prose fiction. The
article resorts to a modified understanding of the term ‘collocation’ as used in lexicography and
corpus linguistics to identify the significant co-occurrence of two or more words in proximity. It
also draws on insights from the Theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition, in particular as concerns
the use of the term ‘formula’ in traditional epic poetry, though again some modifications are
required by the nature of Teuthold’s text. The article differentiates between formula as a set of
words which appear in invariant or near-invariant collocation more than once, and a formulaic
pattern, a rather more complex, open system of collocations involving lexical and other fields.
The article isolates a formulaic pattern—that gravitating around the node-word ‘horror’, a key
word for the entire Gothic genre –, defines its component elements and structure within the book,
and analyses its thematic importance. Key to this analysis are the concepts of overpatterning,
ritualization, equivalence and visibility.
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Keywords
collocation, equivalence, field, formula, formulaic pattern, Gothic fiction, horror, overpatterning, ritualization, visibility
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 49.2 (2014), pp. 105-123