Gothic novel

Gothic novel, Romantic pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries.

Early and classic Gothic fiction

Such fiction is called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins; Gothic novels commonly use such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors. The vogue was initiated in England by Horace Walpole’s immensely successful The Castle of Otranto (1765). His most respectable follower was Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) are among the best examples of the genre.

A more sensational type of Gothic romance exploiting horror and violence flourished in Germany and was introduced to England by Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk (1796). Other landmarks of Gothic fiction are William Beckford’s Arabian romance Vathek (1786) and Charles Robert Maturin’s story of an Irish Faust, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The first Gothic novel by an American writer was Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798).

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The classic horror stories Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker, are in the Gothic tradition but introduce the existential nature of humankind as its definitive mystery and terror.

(Read Britannica’s article about the “haunted summer of 1816” that gave birth to the monsters of Gothic fiction.)

Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of major writers such as Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1853) and Great Expectations (1861).

Modern Southern gothic fiction

In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals. At the same time, Southern gothic came to be the name for a style of writing practiced by many writers of the American South whose stories set in that region are characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents. Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers are among the best-known writers of Southern gothic. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries Cormac McCarthy, Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, and Colson Whitehead published acclaimed works of fiction that feature Southern gothic elements.

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Gothic poetry

Although Gothic literature is mostly associated with fiction, the Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, and Victorian eras produced many fine examples of Gothic poetry. Among the best in English literature are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and “Christabel” (1816), John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans merci” (both composed in 1819), and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862), as well as pieces by Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In the United States, Edgar Allan Poe’s intensely moody ballad “The Raven” (1845) is the most famous. Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems also display a Gothic flair.