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Gothic Novel: Gothic Novels
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The English Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), which was enormously popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon became a recognizable genre. To most modern readers... The Castle of Otranto is dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense, despite the supernatural manifestations and a young maiden's flight through dark vaults. But contemporary readers found the novel electrifying original and thrillingly suspenseful, with its remote setting, its use of the supernatural, and its medieval trappings, all of which have been so frequently imitated and so poorly imitated that they have become stereotypes. The genre takes its name from Otranto's medieval–or Gothic–setting.
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Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) was the first novel to be described or labeled as Gothic. Since then, the Gothic has remained a popular genre in a multitude of different forms. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Ann Radcliffe’s novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, were extremely popular. Radcliffe’s Udolpho even inspired Jane Austen’s satire of the Gothic novel, Northanger Abbey. During the Victorian period, the Gothic novel was associated with the sensational novel, like those written by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. During the mid-nineteenth century in America, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe were writing Gothic tales.
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Eleanor Sleath, novelist, the author of five Gothic novels, is most well known for her first, The Orphan of the Rhine (1798). Even though it was dismissed the following year by the Critical Review as one of many “vapid and servile imitations” of Radcliffe, it has been remembered as one of the seven novels mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). Who's the murderer? (1802) met with a more favourable reception by a critic from The Monthly Magazine who was surprised to find such a “richness of language” in a Minerva Press novel. Sleath went on to publish The Bristol Heiress: or the Errors of Education (1809), The Nocturnal Minstrel: or the Spirit of the woods (1810) and Pyrenean Banditti (1811).
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Frankenstein has been called the finest Gothic novel and the first science fiction novel and an outstanding feminist novel. A key to unlocking its richness is an understanding of the classic Gothic elements Mary Shelly used and transcended. "Frankenstein 2018" explores the Literary Gothic genre independent of and within the context of the novel, and then beyond, into film. Building the Web-based project of student writing will provide them with an opportunity to make contributions of their work and open a dialog among students in different schools on a topic of academic importance -- and one that is inherently intriguing as well.
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This fully illustrated online gothic novel, Grotesque, A Gothic Epic, is an historical epic adventure that unfolds in the Late Middle Ages. Squire Lazarus Gogu is a winged grotesque who is thrown into the hostile world of pious men who would kill him and fallen angels who are bent on escaping Hell. Under seemingly impossible circumstances, Lazarus must fight to stay alive, keep his faith, and stop the unfolding of a medieval Armageddon.
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Walpole wrote the first gothic novel in 1756 and Maturin perhaps wrote the last in 1820. The Gothic novel [F]rom England, the Schauer novel from Germany and the novel noir from France are all names for the same phenomenon - the dawn of dark romanticism. These novels shared many atributes - the castle or the monastery, the villains, the supernatural creatures (monsters, vampires, werewolfs) the hero and the heroine etc.The novels were (over)loaded with strong emotions and violent effects/affects. The drama is extremely pathetic and grotesque, influenced by medieval romances like Don Quixote and medieval folklore. Actually, so many horror novels were written that it is quite impossible to assemble them all here. In England for example, Victorian Bloods were quite popular - amateur short novels sold in the street for a penny.
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Gothic Novels