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LECTURE 4

THE GOTHIC NOVEL AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ROMANTIC ERA IN MODERN EUROPEAN
LITERATURE

One of the most interesting English types of Novels is the one known as the GOTHIC NOVEL that
emerged in the late 1700s and early 1800s as fiction was becoming popular as a genre in Modern
European Literature.
This is an English genre of fiction popular in the 18th to early 19th centuries, characterized by an
atmosphere of mystery and horror and having a pseudo-medieval setting.
Gothic fiction is a genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and at
times romance.
The Gothic novel is a type of pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and
terror.
In the most general terms, Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and
picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of
exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread.
Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible
secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.
Despite the fairly common use of this bleak motif, Gothic writers have also
used supernatural elements, touches of romance, well-known historical characters, and travel and
adventure narratives to entertain their readers.
The type is a subgenre of Romantic literature—that's Romantic the period, not romance novels with
breathless lovers with wind-swept hair on their paperback covers—and much fiction today stems
from it.
Throughout the 18th century, the phenomenon of the Gothic emerged and flourished across Britain.
With its emphasis on suspense and the supernatural, terror and the macabre, the Gothic was
heralded as a “medieval revival” that stood against the Enlightenment's focus on reason.
In 1764, Horace Walpole introduced to the world a new genre of literature known as Gothic fiction.
He employed elements of the supernatural as well as the everyday in a manner to strike fear into the
reader. ... This movement influenced the philosophy, art, architectural, music and literature of that
period.
The period typically associated with European Gothic fiction begins with Horace Walpole's The Castle
of Otranto published in 1764 and ends with Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer published in
1820.
With an eerie mystery and an ancestral curse, filled with isolation, dark settings, and a fallen hero,
this novel brought fear into the lives of its readers and sparked the beginning of the literary genre of
the Gothic.
 Gothic elements include the following:
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 Setting in a castle. .
 An atmosphere of mystery and suspense. An ancient prophecy is connected with the castle
or its inhabitants (either former or present).
 Omens, portents, visions.
 Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events.
 High, even overwrought emotion.
 Women in distress.

The Gothic novel is a genre associated with the mystery and intrigue surrounding the supernatural
and the unknown. Characteristics of the Gothic include: death and decay, haunted homes/castles,
family curses, madness, powerful love/romance, ghosts, and vampire.
The Gothic novel, is one of the earliest kinds of fiction in modern Europe that imitated not the
classical period but rather the Dar Ages also known as the Medieval period. It has a prevailing
atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in
subsequent centuries.
Called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, such
novels commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean
passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors.
The novel kind known as the Gothic was initiated in England by Horace Walpole’s immensely
successful Castle of Otranto (1765). His most respectable follower was Ann Radcliffe,
whose Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Italian (1797) are among the best examples of the genre. A
more sensational type of Gothic romance exploiting horror and violence flourished in Germany and
was introduced to England by Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk (1796). Other landmarks of
Gothic fiction are William Beckford’s Oriental romance Vathek (1786) and Charles Robert Maturin’s
story of an Irish Faust, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).
The classic horror stories Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Dracula (1897),
by Bram Stoker, are in the Gothic tradition but introduce the existential nature of humankind as its
definitive mystery and terror.
Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic
atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë
sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great
Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances
having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals.
CONCLUSION
Emerging in Europe in the 18th century, Gothic literature grew out of the
Romantic literary movement. It's a genre that places strong emphasis on intense emotion, pairing
terror with pleasure, death with romance. The Gothic is characterized by its darkly picturesque
scenery and its eerie stories of the macabre.
Remember for always that Gothic literature developed during the Romantic period in Britain. The
first mention of "Gothic," as pertaining to literature, was in the subtitle of Horace Walpole's 1765
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story "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story" which was supposed to have been meant by the author
as a subtle joke—"When he used the word it meant something like ‘barbarous,’ as well as ‘deriving
from the Middle Ages." In the book, it's purported that the story was an ancient one, then recently
discovered. But that's just part of the tale.
The supernatural elements in the story, though, launched a whole new genre, which took off in
Europe. Then America's Edgar Allen Poe got a hold of it in the mid-1800s and succeeded like no one
else.
In Gothic literature, he found a place to explore psychological trauma, the evils of man, and mental
illness. Any modern-day zombie story, detective story, or the writer you all love today called Stephen
King novel owes a debt to Poe. There may have been successful Gothic writers before and after him,
but no one perfected the genre quite like Poe.
Today, Gothic literature has been replaced by ghost and horror stories, detective fiction, suspense
and thriller novels, and other contemporary forms that emphasize mystery, shock, and sensation.
While each of these types is (at least loosely) indebted to Gothic fiction, the Gothic genre was also
appropriated and reworked by novelists and poets who, on the whole, cannot be strictly classified as
Gothic writers.
In the novel Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen affectionately showcased the misconceptions and
immaturities that could be produced by misreading Gothic literature.
In experimental narratives such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
transplanted Gothic preoccupations—threatening mansions, family secrets, doomed romance—to
the American South. And in his multigenerational chronicle One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel
García Márquez constructs a violent, dreamlike narrative around a family house that takes on a dark
life of its own.

Home Work

Read the PDF of the short story by Bram Storker. It has been shared with you separately in PDF.