Gothic literature began in the later eighteenth century. Its origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. The novel was immensely popular and had many imitators. It set out many of the conventions of what was to become the 'Gothic novel'.
Notable works of Gothic literature:
The great volume of Gothic novels produced from the 1770s to 1820 is too great to list here. A short sample of the rediscovered Northanger Abbey 'horrid novels' is an example of some of the many that were probably justifiably forgotten.
- Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 1764. The daddy of them all.
- Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron, 1778.
- William Beckford, Vathek, 1782.
- William Godwin, Caleb Williams, 1794. The gothic used for political means.
- Anne Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 1791. A profound influence on the Gothic novel. Radcliffe developed the technique of the 'explained supernatural'.
---, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794.
---, The Italian, 1797.
- Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, 1796.
- Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya; or, The Moor, 1806.
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818.
- John William Polidori, 'The Vampyre', 1819. The first of the Byronic vampires.
- Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820. The last -- and the culmination -- of the classic Gothic novels.
Satires and Parodies:
- Jane Austen, Nothanger Abbey, 1817. Parodies many tropes of Gothic fiction, especially the works of Ann Radcliffe.
- Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey 1818. Satirizes Gothic novels and the Romantic movement.
Conventions of the Gothic Novel
This is by no means exhaustive, but it sets out some of the common conventions in Gothic novels.
Style and Atmosphere:
- Aspects of self-parody or camp.
- Dreams.
- Rich imagery and language.
- Mystery and dread.
- Power and constraint. It's not a gothic novel if the heroine is not locked up or constrained in some way. They are also usually pursued and/or forced into marriage.
- Terror and horror.
- The Supernatural.
- Transgression. There is not a crime that a Gothic villain has not commited in some gothic novel or another.
Characters:
- Strong emotions. A cliché of gothic novels is the amount of times their heroines faint in terror or excess of emotion.
- Distressed Heroine.
- Villain-Hero. In different forms: the Satanic Hero, the Promethean Hero, and the Byronic Hero.
- The Outsider.
Setting:
- Distant time period, especially a medieval setting.
- Foreign setting, especially Catholic countries such as Spain and Italy. Germany and France are also big favourites.
- Setting in a castle or stately home. Especially if it is isolated, semi-ruinous, haunted, and possessing a forbidden wing.
- The Sublime. This includes landscape and as well as weather.
Narration:
- Unreliable narrators.
- Nested narration.
Gothic Influences in Romantic Poetry
Several Romantic poems have elements of the Gothic without being wholly Gothic works.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, his first published work was the gothic novel Zastrozzi: A Romance , 1810, followed by
--- St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, A Romance, 1811.
--- The Cenci, 1819.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798.
--- Christabel, Part 1, 1797; Part 2, 1801; published 1816.
- Lord Byron, The Giaour, 1813.
--- Manfred: A dramatic poem, 1817.
- John Keats, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, 1818.
