'The Hollow Echo': Gothic fiction and the structure of a formulaic pattern

• Published in: Formulaicity and Creativity in Language and Literature pp. 97 - 112
• Main Author: Aguirre, Manuel
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2018
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Iron Claw; Perpetrator Figure; Widow Twankey; Echo; Sicilian Romance; Semantic Prosody; Vice Versa; Tinker Bell; SOUND ECHOES; Horror Vacui; Formulaic Pattern; Co-occurrence Relations; Minerva Press; Semantic Preference; Young Men; Fairy Tale; Elana Gomel; Lf; Gothic Reality; Place; Key Word
• ISBN: 9781138721579; 1138721573; 0367229676; 9780367229672
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315194295-7

The article proposes a methodology for the analysis of formulaic discourse in a Gothic novel, Peter Teuthold's The Necromancer (1794). It builds on insights from both corpus linguistics and the theory of oral-formulaic composition, while adjusting them to the realities of a prose literary text. Concentrating on the 11 occurrences of the lexeme 'echo' in the novel, it analyses the various linguistic formations in which the word appears - a system of lexical, phonological, syntactic and connotative 'fields' held together by various types of equivalence. These build a flexible 'formulaic pattern' (to be distinguished from the rigid 'formula') characterised by iteration and variation. Analysis then shows how the formulaic pattern of 'echo' thematises iteration and shapes an unstable, liminal environment which exhibits attributes of the chaotic, elicits the experience of horror and constitutes a trope for the structure of Gothic reality.