The Victorian Gothic.

Hi my dear readers! If you have attended to my class presentation about the influence of the gothic in the Victorian Age, you must know what I'm going to tell you in this post because I will deal more or less with the same topic.

Although in the Victorian Age the Gothic fiction was not more the dominant genre, in many ways it was in a very creative stage at that time. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe was an important and innovative author in this period. Instead of the traditional elements of gothic stories, like the supernatural, prophecies and the rest of them seen in class, his stories focuses more on the psychology of his characters. A good example of Poe's Gothic would be his story "The Fall of the House of Usher", published in 1839.

Another innovative element was the introduction of the byronic hero that comes from the Romatic Period into the Gothic. The typical byronic hero is arrogant, cunning, disrespectful, intelligent, sexually attractive, sophisticated and educated among other characteristics. So the epitome of the byronic hero could be Dorian Gray, the character invented by Oscar Wilde in 1890.

The last innovative element I'm going to treat is the inclusion of topics like the ethics and the moral degeneration of the society. This fact happened in the 1880s and the Gothic Fiction dealing with themes like this was called Urban Gothic. In it, social structures of the time were questioned. One important book that portrays this was Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1836.

Well, to conclude I say that I hope you enjoy this post and also I hope that the aim of it will be realized. Obviously, the aim is to teach and to entertain ;)

Invented Words in Gulliver's Travels.

Dear and loyal readers! In this post I am going to write about the invented words that appear in Gulliver's Travels and I will give you some examples of these words.
Sometimes, Jonathan Swift created new terms in this book in order to cover up what he really wanted to mean, but most of time, the language invented by him is formed by nonsense words, not all of them have a meaning.
I will give you some examples of both, nonsense invented words, and invented words with meaning.
There are many examples of the first type. One of it is Glumgluffs that is located in the first voyage, the voyage to Lilliput, and for the context we can deduce that it is a kind of measure. In the voyage to Brobdingnag it can been found an invented expression, it is Relplum Scalcath that according to Gulliver means freak of nature, an exception to the general laws of nature. Also in the third voyage it can be seen invented words such as Flandona Gagnole, that refers to the astronomers's cave. To end up with the examples of nonsense invented words I take one of the last voyage, it is the word yahoo. With this word it is named a kind of humanoid creature who lives in the Houynhnhms land.
The examples of the second type are fewer. Lilliput itself could be a word with meaning. It could be formed by two separated words: "lilli" that could mean little and "put" that may have been from de Latin "putus" and means little boy. Another example of this kind of words is Brobdingnag that may have been formed as an anagram of big, grand and noble but without using the syllable -le. The last example I give you comes from the voyage to Laputa. In it appears two words, Tribnia and Langden, in order to refer to a kingdom visited by Gulliver. These words are in fact an anagram of Britain and England.
To end up I say that there are more examples of invented words in Gulliver's Travels but I hope you will enjoy these examples, and also I hope you will find this post interesting.