Gothic horror a_history
Transcript of Gothic horror a_history
Gothic Horror
A brief history
The first Gothic Novel
• Gothic fiction or gothic horror was first believed to be invented by the author Horace Walpole in 1764. With his novel The Castle of Otranto.
• He was obsessed with the Gothic so much he turned his house into a castle named Strawberry Hill.
Other Authors
• Because of the nature of the Gothic Horror Genre it was picked up by other authors traditionally writing in the romance genre.
• Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)• John Polidori – The Vampyre (1819)
• The nature of this genre enabled parodies to be produced e.g. Jane Austen’s – Northanger Abby(1818). In this novel the young protagonist imagines a murder after reading too much gothic horror.
• The truth is uninteresting
Victorian Gothic• It was thought
that Gothic horror had reached it’s end by the Victorian era
• It had declined into cheap horror fiction of the ‘penny blood’ or ‘Penny dreadful’.
Edgar Allan Poe
• An important re – interpreter of the Gothic Horror genre.
• Believed in terrors of the soul rather that a place.
• He brought Gothic Horror back from the dead.
Women’s Gothic
• Not only did Poe revive the Gothic Horror Genre but women took a new place in this genre by adding the ideas which explored a woman’s position in society and her entrapment of domestic space.
• Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights (1847)
• Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre (1847)
• Yep they are sisters.
Also in the revival
• Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
• Bram Stokers – Dracula (1897)
• Dracula is considered the locus classicus of gothic literature.
• Locus – place• Classicus – belonging to
the highest class• The best place or best
example.
The 20th Century to Today
• The historical writers we just met still are studied and influence writers today.
• For example:
• H.P. Lovecraft and his protégé Robert Bloch penned Psycho (1954)
• Now also a film.
• Although Gothic horror soon gave way to modern horror fiction many of the modern horror writer produce books in the sensibilities of the Gothic Horror Genre
• Such as; Anne Rice and Steven King.