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Fear, shock, dread, or disgust
- Gothic lit often elicits intense, suspenseful feelings of fear, shock, dread, or disgust in the reader.
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Gothic novels tend to create a feeling of uncertainty, by making the characters and the reader question what they believe and what is real.
- Mystery and Fear. One of the crucial components of a captivating Gothic story evokes feelings of suspense and fear. Anything that is beyond scientific understanding lends way to mystery, and Gothic atmospheres leverage this principle.
- Omens and Curses. Foreshadowing, a literary device used to hint at events to come, occurs in the form of visions, omens, and curses throughout many narratives in Gothic literature.
- Atmosphere and Setting. Gothic novelists set the tone by carefully choosing the physical location of a scene, as the atmosphere and environment of a Gothic novel directly contributed to the feeling of fear and uneasiness.
- Supernatural and Paranormal Activity. Much of Gothic literature’s allure comes from the genre’s suggestion of supernatural or inexplicable events, such as inanimate objects coming to life, ghosts, spirits, and vampires like that of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic fantasy, Dracula.
The term Gothic novel refers to European Romantic pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries. The first Gothic novel in English was Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Reedsy
- The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764) Some sources say that the Gothic truly began with The Castle of Otranto, an 18th-century melodrama by the English writer and politician Horace Walpole.
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) The story of Frankenstein has haunted our collective imagination since its conception by Mary Shelley on one dark night.
- The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe (1839) Edgar Allan Poe: master of mystery, poet of the macabre, and brooding Gothic icon. In his stories, Poe places his primary focus on psychological torment, turning inward from ominous Gothic atmospheres to explore the horrors of the mind.
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) Like other Gothic novels before it, Jane Eyre makes its setting the quintessential isolated house beset by secrets.
This is a female Gothic novel that is concerned with the repressed, and the dissolution of boundaries between the mind and everything exterior. If nothing else, it follows the American Gothic tradition of the haunted house which inevitably engages with the female fear of entrapment and psychosis.
Gothic novel | Definition, Elements, Authors, Examples, Meaning, & Facts | Britannica. Gothic novel, European Romantic pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries.
Mar 11, 2019 · Its spirit is characterized by a tone of high agitation and unresolved or almost-impossible-to-resolve anxiety, fear, unnatural elation, and desperation. The first gothic novel is identifiable with a precision unusual in genre study.
