Super Glossary

Gothic Novel

Entertainment / Literature / Gothic Novel: A type of romance wildly popular between 1760 up until the 1820s that has influenced the ghost story and horror story. The stories are designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural. As J. A. Cuddon suggests, the conventions include wild and desolate landscapes, ancient buildings such as ruined monasteries, cathedrals, and castles with dungeons, torture chambers, secret doors, and winding stairways, apparitions such as phantoms, demons, and necromancers, an atmosphere of brooding gloom, and youthful, handsome heroes and fainting (or screaming!) Heroines who face off against corrupt aristocrats, wicked witches, and hideous monsters. Conventionally, female characters are threatened by powerful or impetuous male figures, and description functions through a metonymy of fear by presenting details designed to evoke horror, disgust, or terror (see Cuddon's discussion, 381-82). The term Gothic originally was applied to a tribe of Germanic barbarians during the dark ages and their now-extinct language, but eventually historians used it to refer to the gloomy and impressive style of medieval architecture common in Europe, hence 'Gothic Castle' or 'Gothic Architecture.' The term became associated with ghost stories and horror novels because early Gothic novels were often associated with the Middle Ages and with things 'wild, bloody, and barbarous of long ago' as J. A. Cuddon puts it in his Dictionary of Literary Terms (381). Alternatively, the label gothic may have come about because Horace Walpole, one of the early writers, wrote his works in a faux medieval castle). The best known early example is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Later British writers in the Gothic tradition include 'Monk' Lewis, Charles Maturin, William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley. American Gothic writers include Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Famous novels such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula are also considered gothic novels. In modern cartoons, Scooby Doo would also fall into the category of mock gothic drama in animated form. Gothic novels are also called gothic romances.
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