The Pleasure of Fear: Paradoxes of Gothic Poetics in the French “Black Novels” of the 1790 S

In the process of the formation of the “black novel” poetics in French literature at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries, along with its Baroque and sentimentalist origins, both translations of English Gothic novels and various stylizations for them play a significant role. The appeal of describing novelistic “horrors” determines their growing popularity among readers. Paradoxically, it turns out that parodies of such works arise almost immediately — both in England and in France, testifying more to the viability of this genre than to its decline. Unlike the English Gothic plots, which involve mandatory departure to the Middle Ages and other countries, in France, the plot of such novels can also become post-revolutionary modernity. One of the first parodies of the “horror novel”, English Night by Bellen de la Liborliere, is a kind of medley of borrowings from various Gothic works, the reading of which brings pleasure to the main character, who became rich on the confiscation of the property of aristocratic emigrants, bourgeois Dabo, and becomes a means of obtaining from him consent to the marriage of his son Roger with his beloved noblewoman Ursula. The play of imagination, the concentration of romantic cliches, the psychologization of Gothic fears becomes a way of combining the ridiculous and the frightening in the poetics of the “black novel”.