A Survey Of Gothic Literature Compiled By RCBC Student Jacob Ford
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Early Gothic Literature:
The vogue for all things Gothic arose out of the Romantic movement. This movement was a response to the cold rationality that had preoccupied Western thinkers since the Enlightenment. Poets and writers sought to express emotion and human experience. To do so, they turned to the rural landscape, European history, and the medieval romance. Gothic, originally a term to denote a medieval art and architectural style, took these fantasies of a lost, pagan Europe to their logical extremes.
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Horace Walpole
September 24, 1717 - March 2, 1797
Horace Walpole is considered the father of Gothic literature. The youngest son of former British prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, Horace was privately educated, served as a member of parliament, and was well known in aristocratic circles. Besides publishing the first Gothic novel with The Castle of Otranto in 1765, Walpole also made great contributions to the Gothic Revival movement in architecture. In 1748 he purchased a cottage in Twickenham, England and spent the rest of his life transforming it and its gardens into a pseudo-Gothic palace, naming it Strawberry Hill.
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Sprawling Castles & Isolated Ruins
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He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
The Castle of Otranto
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The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole
published 1765
The Castle of Otranto, originally published as The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto, purports to be a manuscript found by the anonymous author. The novel tells the story of the maiden Isabella and her doomed proposal to the noble Conrad and the subsequent machinations of the evil lord Manfred. The Castle of Otranto is the first of the Gothic novels and is notable for utilizing what would become common tropes e.g. the innocent maiden, the supernatural, a haunted structures, and a pervasive sense of terror.
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Matthew Gregory Lewis
July 9, 1775 - May 14, 1818
The author of The Monk, Matthew Gregory Lewis was born into a well-heeled family with ties to the then British colony of Jamaica. Groomed for ambassadorial work by his father, Lewis was fluent in German and served in the British embassy in Holland. Besides his best-selling and scandalous novel, Lewis was an accomplished playwright and poet. Matthew Gregory Lewis perished of yellow fever at age forty-three while sailing to his family's Jamaican plantation.
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Ambrosio was yet to learn, that to an heart unacquainted with her, Vice is ever most dangerous when lurking behind the Mask of Virtue.
The Monk
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The Monk: A Romance
by Mathew Gregory Lewis
published 1796
The Monk follows the holy man Ambrosio and his descent into spiritual and sexual degeneracy after he begins an affair with the supernatural temptress Matilda. Lewis' novel is extraordinary for its depictions of sex and violence, earning the author condemnation and scandal. Of course, this didn't impede the work's popularity among readers.
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Female Writers and Readers
Female writers played an important role in the development of the Gothic novel. While still limited in their participation in society and not held in the same esteem as their male peers, women were able to find a voice in Gothic fiction. Likewise, newly educated female readers contributed to these writers' success.
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Ann Radcliffe
July 9, 1764 - February 7, 1823
Born Ann Ward in 1764, Ann Radcliffe was the preeminent female novelist of her age. Reserved and bookish, Radcliffe published five novels in her lifetime and one posthumously. Radcliffe's prose and sense of suspense set her apart from her contemporaries, she is remembered as the most literary of the early Gothic novelists.
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The moon now drew a faint light over their path, and, soon after, enabled them to distinguish some towers rising above the tops of the woods
The Mysteries of Udolpho
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The Mysteries of Udolpho
by Ann Radcliffe
published 1794
The quintessential Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho follows heroine Emily St. Aubert. Whisked away to a crumbling castle, Emily must fend off the constant persecutions of the dastardly Montoni, as well various possibly supernatural threats.
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Gothic Revival Architecture
Horace Walpole’s estate Strawberry Hill
the Palace of Westminster, a Gothic Revival masterpiece
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Victorian Gothic:
The 19th century in England was marked by the long, stable reign of Queen Victoria. The Victorian epoch saw the birth of mass media culture. Literacy was on the rise and the combination of a mature printing industry and advanced communication and transport made an early modern popular culture possible. The Victorians had an endless appetite for all things macabre and exotic and strict social structures contributed to private lust for the erotic and salacious.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
August 30, 1797 - February 1, 1851
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, daughter of noted feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and radical philosopher William Godwin, was best known in her early years for her scandalous romance with Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, Wollstonecraft Shelley quickly established herself as an artist in her own right, outliving her husband by many years and contributing numerous novels, poems, and nonfiction pieces to the canon of English literature.
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