Mountains, Castles, Superstitions

This is an imagological study, aiming at analysing the images of Austria in nineteenth-century British and American Gothic literature, examining their origin and their connection to national stereotypes and their use in literary texts. Austria was used by several writers of the nineteenth century as setting for their Gothic stories, because, its stereotypic image in Britain and America fulfilled the requirements for a Gothic setting, consisting of pictures of wild and sublime nature, medieval castles, backward and superstitious people, strict Catholic priests and absolutist Monarchs. Austria's Gothic image developed gradually and was shaped by the socio-political and historical events of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as by the cultural and political relationships between the countries and by public opinion in Britain and America, which can be traced in contemporary press. Finally, Austria's Gothic Image was formed and transmitted by many travelogues of the period, which influenced several writers who, drawing information from them or from their own autoptic experiences and the popular stereotypes, wrote Gothic tales set in Austria.