Divorce, mistaken identity, ghosts, murder, and general mayhem ensue.Īfter Walpole, other early contributors to Gothic literature included William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, and Clara Reeve. This is a tragedy, yes, but Manfred dreads something worse than his son's death: an ancient curse on his family. On the day his son is to wed a princess, a helmet falls from the castle wall and kills him. It tells the story of the doomed Manfred, lord of the castle, and his heirs. It is said that Walpole took inspiration from his own 18th-century Gothic-styled home (which had a very un-Goth name: Strawberry Hill House) for this novel. The first work to be classified as Gothic literature is English author Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764. While an enormous departure from the realistic works that had dominated literature for so long, it was welcomed with wide open arms. Fans of Gothic fiction embraced the genre's dives into the unknown and the mysterious, reveling in the sensation of being kept on edge. An offshoot of the movement of Romanticism, which was popularized in the first half of the 18th century in Europe and marked by abundance of emotions and imagination, Gothic fiction took such passionate characteristics and added a darker tone. Gothic fiction embraces a romantic idealization of death, mixed with high drama and the supernatural. Like Gothic architecture, this literary style is marked by vivid images of foreboding castles and mansions with secret alcoves and shadowy rooms. Gothic fiction's roots go back nearly 300 years to Britain in the mid-18th century. With its large, looming windows, pointy peaks, and dark facades, Gothic architecture paved the way for a whole gloomy genre of music, fashion, and, of course, literature. This style was used on cathedrals, castles, mansions, and more. One of the primary definitions of “Gothic” relates to an architectural style that originated in northern France in the 12th century. But Gothic fiction is more than just cobwebs and candelabras. These creepy, creaky literary classics have the power to transport listeners to foggy moors and crumbling estates, where wolves howl in the night and shadows lurk in the hallways. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. Some of the most popular and enduring novels and short stories are works of Gothic fiction, including Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Strange Case of Dr.
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