The Monk or the model of revolutionary rhetorics: a metamorphosis of evil

Abstract

The attraction for terror, mystery and monsters has existed even since ancient times, as
the novels and Hellenistic tragedies, but also Elizabethan drama. However it is from the
second half of the 18th century and especially towards the French Revolution, when the libertine novels appear in France, also called romans noirs, and the gothic novels in
England, called tales of terror as a response to the Enlightenment paradigm that takes
medieval materials redefining them in order to create new aesthetic forms. I am
interested here to study the metamorphoses of evil that revolutionary rhetoric, in this
case, The Monk, operates as a gothic novel through the recovery and resemantization of
medieval evil, according to which the latter reflect the sinister singularity of modern
literature .I will mainly take the concepts of monstrosity and evil and analyze them
hermeneutically to interpret what the metamorphosis of these categories is like in the
late eighteenth century, with the event of the French Revolution in the aforementioned
work. In this work we brace The Monk as a model of the revolutionary rhetoric that will
mark the aesthetic trend towards the 19th century thanks to his original commitment
that is firstly to represent the metamorphosis of evil even using medieval materials, and
secondly, to attend to the place of receptors, caring about producing certain aesthetics
that arouse interest in a new sensibility.