”All this will presently be; but at first there is only the ruin”. Om romantikens reception av Netley Abbey i bild och text.

Sammanfattning: In late 18th and early 19th century Britain, a new literary genre called The Gothic was created. It heavily featured architecture and its space in order to create atmosphere and emotional impact. The rise of the Gothic novel coincided with a growing interest in Gothic architecture. In order to gain knowledge about the conception of Gothic architecture during the romantic era, this bachelorʼs thesis investigates the correlation between medieval Gothic architecture and the Gothic literature of the 18th and 19th century. The base of this inquiry is a collection of pictorial and textual representations of the ruins of Netley Abbey, a 13th century Cistercian monastery. The romantic revaluation of what the word Gothic meant – and what the architecture connected to it signified – was quite dramatic. The medieval Gothic architecture was supposed to convey godliness and sacred light, but in the Gothic literature it was presented as something dark and mysterious. By filtering the analysis of the representations of Netley Abbey through the typical traits of Gothic literature, the conception of Gothic architecture – which allowed for this significant revaluation of impression and visual rhetoric – of the romantic era is made distinct. The ruins of Netley Abbey are consistently portrayed as something on the border between such categories as nature-culture, history-the present and sacred-profane. This creates the impression of an architecture that manages to uphold a constant liminal, sublime state. It also sets the ruins apart from reality, creating an heterotopia of time and space – a consecrated space for the sublime. This advances the idea of Gothic architecture as a bearer of an immanent numinousness.