The Castle of Otranto

Simone Kett 14164809 Christina Morin English and History LM035 1473 words 17 October 2014 The manner in which Burke’s idea of the Sublime emerges in the Castle of Otranto According to Edmund Burke, the sublime is the most intense feeling we are capable of feeling. It is both pain and pleasure drove by complete astonishment. In The origins of our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, Burke states that “the passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment” (53). In literature, authors use the sublime through their plots, their setting and their characters. In this paper I would first like to discuss gothic and what it means, some of the characteristics seen in gothic literature…

It appears that almost all characters from The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole suffers in at least one point of the text. The characters that appear to suffer the most are Manfred’s family. It is not a coincidence that these characters suffer so many hardships. Manfred’s ancestor has committed horrible sins and it is Manfred’s family that gets punished for them. Manfred’s ancestor Ricardo has sinned against Alfonso the Good and in order to correct his sins Alfonso the Good visits the present…

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto begins with the death of the groom, Conrad, and ends with the death of his sister, Matilda. The story interacts closely with death and the looming threat of death, which serves as a catalyst. With the introduction of death, characters become aware of finite life and take extreme actions to fulfill their desires. Although males have faulted characters before interactions with death, their masculinity only becomes toxic when they are familiarized with the…

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…

and attentiveness. This reaction prepares someone to defend them self. Scientists often refer to this as “fight or flight” (Hutchins). This simply means that people either fight their source of fear or run from it. This method was used as a survival technique for early humans. Gothic Elements in the novel are used to scare readers and activate the human fear response. Also, by increasing one’s stress level can have a direct impact to the level of fear that they are coping with. In the…

The two excerpts Castle of Otranto and “Sir Bertrand” are examples of Gothic literature. In these excerpts the main characters find themselves navigating through passages that are very different yet at the same time have overlying themes. A very obvious differences between both environments are that one takes place in a passage under a castle while the other occurs in an antique mansion. Another difference was that Isabella, in Castle of Otranto, traveled along a small confined passage while Sir…

By virtue of being the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto occupies a prime place in the Gothic literary pantheon. However, interest in Otranto has predominantly been informed by its primary position in the Gothic canon, and discussions of Walpole’s text are usually subsumed into a broader analysis of the Gothic genre. This is unsurprising given how expansive the genre has become, including famous works of literature, like Jane Eyre, Dracula and The Bloody Chamber and branching off into…

Southern Ontario Gothic. This branch of the Gothic is characterized by criticism of social attitudes towards race, politics, gender and religion specific for that region, in combination with elements of the supernatural, magic realism and satire. "Gothic" has come to mean quite a number of things by this day and age. It could mean a particular style of art, be it in the form of novels, paintings, or architecture; it could mean "medieval" or "uncouth." It could even refer to a certain type of…

Gothic fiction or Gothicism is a genre or a type of literature and films that is literally a combination of horrors and fictions and even romance at times it also includes death and supernaturalism. It was known to be introduced by a famous Victorian writer Horace Walpole during the 17th century with his famous and well known book The Castle of Otranto also known as the Gothic Story. When he used the word gothic it literally meant something like ‘barbarous’, as well as ‘deriving from the Middle…

The Italian is a text about a kidnapping and The Castle of Otranto is a text about a tyrannical Prince. At a closer look at both texts there are some similarities. In both texts at least one parent against a marriage between two characters that care for one another. In The Italian Vivaldi’s parents are against a marriage and in The Castle of Otranto Theodore’s father is against a pairing between him and Matilda. Also, Ellena, Isabella and Matilda get presented with an undesirable offer of…