Gothic novels

The story of the vampire in the gothic novel is one that began centuries ago. Nowadays, the meaning of the word ‘gothic’ is commonly misconstrued. The word originally pertained to a Germanic tribe called the Goths, centuries later it came to describe novels such as ‘Frankenstein’ (1818) , ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ (1886), ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and ‘Dracula’(1897). The gothic novel is recognised to have begun in England in the late 1700s with heavy focus on setting to show a decaying world, with the characters following similar roles in each novel. The protagonist is almost always isolated and the antagonist is always solely evil in its actions. These classic gothic novels have inspired countless stories and on screen adaptions…

ABSTRACT The gothic novel, albeit not considered high literature, counts among the most distinctive literary genres. The literary form was at its prime in late 18th century, although its days of glory have past elements of the Gothic can be found even in contemporary literature. Over the centuries, several sub-genres of the gothic novel have developed, including Southern Ontario Gothic. This branch of the Gothic is characterized by criticism of social attitudes towards race, politics, gender and…

Jane Austen led the reader and Catherine to believe the spunky General Tilney to be the typical gothic novel’s murderous husband in her book Northanger Abbey. Catherine held a healthy suspicion of General Tilney, even if it was only prompted by her overactive imagination as a gothic novel fangirl. I believe that Jane Austen’s parody wasn’t created in order to belittle the fans of gothic novels, but for the sake of the reader as a cautionary warning of the imminent danger within the bounds of…

The seventeenth-century Gothic novel is associated with the combination of the supernatural realm and Romanticism. Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey, is an attempt to critique the seventeenth-century Gothic novel by identifying Catherine’s sensibility through her over fascination and addiction to reading—such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Austen utilizes Catherine’s obsession with novels as a means to highlight how such fascination has caused Catherine to become naïve and…

In Jane Austen’s Gothic Novel Northanger Abbey, there are two polarizing characters introduced; John Thorpe and Henry Tilney. In virtually every love story there a choice between lovers to be made by the heroine, both exhuming intriguing qualities, and Northanger Abbey is no exception to this. Henry Tilney and John Thorpe happen to be the two men of interest. Austen fascinatingly presents the two men as contrasting characters, both in their values, morals, and behaviors. Austen uses the two…

In the story “A Rose for Emily”, Emily Grierson the main character lives in a house where a horrible stench lingers. The stench began at the time of her father’s death thirty years prior. She was rarely seen outside of her home after his death. Her husband was then suspected of “abandoning” her. No one had entered her house for the last ten years nor had Miss Emily left it. The stench was found to be from her father’s dead body and her husband’s of which she had been sleeping with since she…

Introduction Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera focuses on the conceptual framework of gothic which calls for a definition of gothic literature. The term gothic was originally derived from barbaric conquerors in the 5th Century A.D. where the concept of gothic referred to architectural elements that were built during the middle ages during where it was referred to as barbaric architecture. However, during the 17th century English writers developed many gothic novels where the settings…

Throughout time, different genres of books have risen and fallen and all authors strive to write something that can transcend the boundaries of time. Despite the time period in which books may have been written in, some of the best are preserved and cherished many years after they were published. Charlotte Bronte manages to seamlessly appeal to the tastes of the readers in her era as well as the ones for future generations despite the gothic fiction genre becoming less frequent in recent books.…

The novel “The Castle of Otranto” is written by the well-known predecessor of the gothic fiction – the author Horace Walpole. He contributed greatly to the Gothic genre and inspired a lot of famous authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Daphne du Maurier. His novel was published in 1529, but it is well-known that it was written a lot earlier, supposedly around the era of the first Crusade. In his work, Horace Walpole attempts to combine Old Romance with New Romance – supernatural elements and…

Social and Cultural Background of Genre When trying to understand this genre one must first understand what the meaning of the word ‘Gothic’ means. Gothic is the things that are seen to be barbaric and not naturally pleasing (Anderson, Christensen & Troest, 1998). This genre bloomed in the 1800s and was very popular in those times. The literature pieces that were inspired by this genre seemed to get many critics from the different people that were exposed to it. Some other writers thought of it…