Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The genesis of “Gothic” fiction
- 3 The 1790s
- 4 French and German Gothic
- 5 Gothic fictions and Romantic writing in Britain
- 6 Scottish and Irish Gothic
- 7 English Gothic theatre
- 8 The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830-1880
- 9 The rise of American Gothic
- 10 British Gothic fiction, 1885-1930
- 11 The Gothic on screen
- 12 Colonial and postcolonial Gothic
- 13 The contemporary Gothic
- 14 Aftergothic
- Guide to further reading
- Filmography
- Index
- Series list
1 - Introduction
the Gothic in western culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The genesis of “Gothic” fiction
- 3 The 1790s
- 4 French and German Gothic
- 5 Gothic fictions and Romantic writing in Britain
- 6 Scottish and Irish Gothic
- 7 English Gothic theatre
- 8 The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830-1880
- 9 The rise of American Gothic
- 10 British Gothic fiction, 1885-1930
- 11 The Gothic on screen
- 12 Colonial and postcolonial Gothic
- 13 The contemporary Gothic
- 14 Aftergothic
- Guide to further reading
- Filmography
- Index
- Series list
Summary
Gothic fiction is hardly “Gothic” at all. It is an entirely post-medieval and even post-Renaissance phenomenon. Even though several long-standing literary forms combined in its initial renderings - from ancient prose and verse romances to Shakespearean tragedy and comedy - the first published work to call itself “A Gothic Story” was a counterfeit medieval tale published long after the Middle Ages: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, printed under a pseudonym in England in 1764 and reissued in 1765 in a second edition with a new preface which openly advocated a “blend [of] the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” the former “all imagination and improbability” and the latter governed by the “rules of probability” connected with “common life” (p. 9). The vogue that Walpole began was imitated only sporadically over the next few decades, both in prose fiction and theatrical drama. But it exploded in the 1790s (the decade Walpole died) throughout the British Isles, on the continent of Europe, and briefly in the new United States, particularly for a female readership, so much so that it remained a popular, if controversial, literary mode throughout what we still call the Romantic period in European literature (the 1790s through the early 1830s), now especially well known as the era of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
- 48
- Cited by