Tasmanian Gothic

Tasmanian Gothic is a genre of Tasmanian literature that merges the traditions of Gothic fiction with the history and natural features of Tasmania, an island state south of the Australian continent. Tasmanian Gothic has inspired works in other artistic media, including theatre and film.

Although it deals with the themes of horror, mystery and the uncanny, Tasmanian Gothic literature and art differs from traditional European Gothic Literature, which is rooted in medieval imagery, crumbling Gothic architecture and religious ritual. Instead, the Tasmanian gothic tradition centres on the natural landscape of Tasmania and its colonial architecture and history.

A densely populated Europe of the industrial revolution prompted Urban Gothic literature and novels like Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). But in sparsely populated colonial Australia, especially the penal colony of Tasmania, the religious zeal of some prison wardens (akin, in many ways, to the institutionalised religion of the Inquisition; a theme reflected in European gothicism) and the mysterious rituals and traditions of Tasmania's indigenous Aboriginal inhabitants lent itself to an entirely different gothic tradition.

Frederick Sinnett (founder of the Melbourne Punch), writing in 1856, considered traditional gothic romanticism inappropriate to Australian literature precisely because the colony lacked the requisite antiquity. For many, however, "the very landscape of Australia was gothic".

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