Gothic Horror

A brief history

The first Gothic Novel

• Gothic fiction or gothic horror was first believed to be invented by the author Horace Walpole in 1764. With his novel The Castle of Otranto.

• He was obsessed with the Gothic so much he turned his house into a castle named Strawberry Hill.

Other Authors

• Because of the nature of the Gothic Horror Genre it was picked up by other authors traditionally writing in the romance genre.

• Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)• John Polidori – The Vampyre (1819)

• The nature of this genre enabled parodies to be produced e.g. Jane Austen’s – Northanger Abby(1818). In this novel the young protagonist imagines a murder after reading too much gothic horror.

• The truth is uninteresting

Victorian Gothic• It was thought

that Gothic horror had reached it’s end by the Victorian era

• It had declined into cheap horror fiction of the ‘penny blood’ or ‘Penny dreadful’.

Edgar Allan Poe

• An important re – interpreter of the Gothic Horror genre.

• Believed in terrors of the soul rather that a place.

• He brought Gothic Horror back from the dead.

Women’s Gothic

• Not only did Poe revive the Gothic Horror Genre but women took a new place in this genre by adding the ideas which explored a woman’s position in society and her entrapment of domestic space.

• Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights (1847)

• Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre (1847)

• Yep they are sisters.

Also in the revival

• Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

• Bram Stokers – Dracula (1897)

• Dracula is considered the locus classicus of gothic literature.

• Locus – place• Classicus – belonging to

the highest class• The best place or best

example.

The 20th Century to Today

• The historical writers we just met still are studied and influence writers today.

• For example:

• H.P. Lovecraft and his protégé Robert Bloch penned Psycho (1954)

• Now also a film.

• Although Gothic horror soon gave way to modern horror fiction many of the modern horror writer produce books in the sensibilities of the Gothic Horror Genre

• Such as; Anne Rice and Steven King.