Most Read This Week In Gothic

Gothic fiction is a genre of literature that combines elements of both the uncanny and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. Gothic fiction is considered to be the parent genre for both Horror and Mystery, among other genres.

The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initi Gothic fiction is a genre of literature that combines elements of both the uncanny and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. Gothic fiction is considered to be the parent genre for both Horror and Mystery, among other genres.

The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.

Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations — thus the urge to add fake ruins as eye catchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic excesses such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain).

Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.

The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, monks, nuns, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, angels, fallen angels, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew and the Devil himself. ...more

Most Read This Week Tagged "Gothic"

In the Veins of the Drowning (The Siren Mage, #1)

The Sanatorium (Detective Elin Warner, #1)

A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning, #2)

Empire of the Vampire (Empire of the Vampire, #1)

Empire of the Damned (Empire of the Vampire, #2)

The Nightshade God (The Nightshade Crown, #3)

If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You

Dream by the Shadows (The Shadow Weavers Duology, #1)

The Hemlock Queen (The Nightshade Crown, #2)

House of Blight (The Threadmender Chronicles, #1)

The Second Death of Locke (The Hand and the Heart, #1)

Wormwood Abbey (The Secrets of Ormdale, #1)

Crypt of the Moon Spider (Lunar Gothic Trilogy, #1)

Bittersweet in the Hollow (Bittersweet in the Hollow, #1)

The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey

Related Genres

Fiction
Gothic Horror
Southern Gothic
Gothic Romance

Gothic Revival
Ficțion
Fiçtion

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Quotes Tagged “Gothic”

“ This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow. ”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

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“ They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and ra ...more ”
― Susan Hill

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