Gothic Timeline

Question 1

The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole

1764

Answer 1

Written by Horace Walpole and considered the first Gothic novel, it tells the story of Conrad, the son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto, who is crushed to death by an enormous helmet on the morning of his wedding to the beautiful princess Isabella.

Claiming to be translated from an earlier manuscript, The Castle of Otranto introduces what have become classic Gothic devices, such as a foreign location, a dark and ominous castle and a naïve young woman fleeing from an evil, lustful man. In a direct imitation of Shakespearean tragedy, Walpole introduces comedy to relieve the novel’s most melodramatic moments.

Question 2

Vathek

William Beckford

1786

Answer 2

Written by William Beckford and considered one of the most influential Gothic Novels, its hero is the Caliph Vathek who renounces Islam in a hedonistic quest for supernatural powers, which leads to his downfall.

Beckford’s novel reflects the cultural stereotyping that have helped to increase the effect of the imaginative demonology of the mysterious East. Orientalism tries to dehumanize the east to achieve its own goals and shows a demon out of the east.

The people of the west do not have the opportunity to visit the orient themselves so they rely on these orientalist texts which act as a touchstone to prove some ‘facts’ about the orient.

Question 3

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Anne Radcliffe

1794

Answer 3

Ann Radcliffe helps to define what makes a Gothic novel and enjoys massive commercial success.

It tells the story of orphan Emily St. Aubert, who finds herself separated from the man she loves and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt’s new husband, Montoni.

In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe introduces ‘the explained supernatural’ which is a technique by which terrifying supernatural incidents have a logical explanation. Over the course of her previous novels, Radcliffe developed the formula of ‘the female Gothic’.

Question 4

The Italian

Ann Radcliffe

1796

Question 5

The Monk

Matthew Lewis

1796

Answer 5

Matthew Lewis scandalises the literary world.

Lewis’s novel about the misdeeds of a spoiled priest features an incredibly gory finale. It was one of the characters censoring the Bible, however, which most upset its contemporaries – as well as the fact that its teenage author was an MP.

The novel, which has been retrospectively classed as ‘Male Gothic’, features the genre’s typical themes of a lone male, exiled and an outsider.

Question 6

Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen

1817

Answer 6

Jane Austen is a comedic parody of Gothic literature and follows the story of the naïve and sheltered Catherine Morland.

The story follows its heroine, Catherine Morland, who has a passion for macabre Gothic novels and experiences intrigue, adventure, and romance. She is soon confronted with the world of the upper-class and wealthy in Bath and at Northanger Abbey.

The novel, whose lead character is a young girl obsessed by Gothic stories, contains direct references to The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk.

Question 7

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

1818

Answer 7

Lord Byron’s competition produces another Gothic classic: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s story features many gothic spine-tingling elements, including the horror of raising the dead. However the novel, in which a creature created from disparate body parts is brought to life, is often considered to be the first in the science fiction genre and many believe it to be a warning about the dangers of contemporary science.

Frankenstein tells the story of a monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies who develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator.

Question 8

The Vampyre

John Polidori

1819

Answer 8

Considered the father of all vampire novels.

“The most famous vampire in history acts as a metaphor for the pollution of English blood; and the hunt for Dracula is symbolic of the determination to stamp out and eradicate the source of corruption.”

Lord Byron challenged his friends to write a ghost story. Among these friends was John Polidori who wrote The Vampyre-the first vampire story to be written in English. The novel introduces the Byronic hero to Gothic. On publication The Vampyre was wrongly attributed to Byron instead of Polidori but the novel was a success and sparked a craze for similar vampire tales.

Question 9

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

Edgar Allen Poe

1840

Answer 9

Edgar Allan Poe’s collection of short stories is published.

While the tales feature many traditionally frightening Gothic themes, Poe’s characters also suffer psychological terror - “terror of the soul”.

The collection includes Poe’s famous story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, which charts the descent of Roderick Usher into madness through fear. Other stories in the collection feature a collection of madmen and unreliable narrators.

Question 10

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

1847

Question 11

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

1847

Answer 11

Emily Bronte transports Gothic to the wild and dangerous Yorkshire moors, telling the story of the doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and her father’s adopted son, Heathcliff.

The classic romantic novel has become synonymous with the idea of the Female Gothic: where women are trapped and dominated by men.

In addition it includes many other Gothic devices: stories told within stories, the supernatural, the tyrannical ‘villain’, and Wuthering Heights itself, the imposing building in which much of the story is set. In the character of Heathcliff, Bronte creates the ultimate Byronic hero.

Question 12

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

1859

Question 13

Carmilla

Sheridan Le Fanu

1872

Answer 13

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s story establishes the formula for the female vampire.

The story of female vampire Carmilla s a Gothic work, noted as one of the first stories of vampire fiction. Carmilla is a story of a female vampire that preys on young women causing an epidemic in a Styrian town and terror in a young woman’s bedroom.

Le Fanu draws on emerging ideas about female sexuality to depict a vampire whose lesbian inclinations are surprisingly explicit by Victorian standards. Carmilla becomes the model for female vampires in film.

Question 14

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson

1886

Answer 14

Robert Louis Stevenson explores the nature of good and evil.

A literary success in the Victorian era, the tale has lived on and (like Frankenstein and Dracula) its characters have transcended the original text to become a modern myth. The novel is also the fullest articulation of the important Gothic theme of the double: the contrast between good and evil in people or places.

Stevenson anticipates the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whose first psychoanalytic studies were to be published just five years later.

Question 15

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

1891

Answer 15

Dorian Gray, an extremely vain man, makes a deal and stays forever young while a portrait of him painted by his friend ages instead.

“Eventually Gray’s ego and madness escalate and he spirals into a hedonistic life of wanton decadence, sin, and violent ends.”

The novel provides an insight into the lives of the upper classes in society in the late 1800s.

Question 16

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1892

Answer 16

Charlotte Perkins Gilman structures The Yellow Wallpaper as a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has rented an old mansion for the summer.

Confined to a room in her home by her physician husband, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper that adorns the room.

Set in a colonial mansion during the late 19th century, the story sheds light on the treatment of women’s mental health during that era. The protagonist’s descent into madness is intricately linked to her social confinement, lack of agency, and the paternalistic attitudes of the medical profession.

Question 17

Dracula

Bram Stoker

1897

Answer 17

Bram Stoker’s iconic vampire is introduced.

Bram Stoker’s seminal vampire tale, in which, during a business visit to Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, a young English solicitor finds himself at the center of a series of horrifying incidents.

Dracula is a clear demonstration of how Gothic motives are used in addition with contemporary themes and problems. There are racial issues, concerning the risks posed by other racial groups - in this case, like Dracula, from the East.

Stoker also provides us with the problematic of religion and science, an issue of his time, when religion and superstitions were examined and rejected by modern science.

Question 18

Rebecca

Daphne Du Maurier

1938

Answer 18

In a Gothic novel, a young, naïve (usually female) protagonist comes to an old, mysterious place, usually a big English manor house, and tries to make a new life for herself there. Du Maurier both honours and subverts Gothic conventions in her novel, painting a unique picture of psychological—and literal—imprisonment.

At the end of Rebecca, however, du Maurier subverts the usual Gothic tropes as we learn that Manderley is burning to the ground. Instead of adjusting to their prison, Maxim and the narrator must build new lives for themselves.

It’s a powerful reminder of the influence, both positive and negative, that a place can wield over its owner, and (especially in light of the novel’s early 20th century setting) of the declining power of the English aristocracy.

Question 19

Gormenghast Trilogy

Mervyn Peake

1946 - 1959

Answer 19

Mervyn Peake publishes Titus Groan, later followed by Gormenghast and Titus Alone. - the trilogy

Peake’s epic trilogy introduces the castle-kingdom of Gormenghast, an exaggerated, baroque, stylised world that merges Gothic and fantasy literature.

Question 20

Salem’s Lot

Stephan King

1975

Answer 20

The book is set in 1975 starting in a small town in Maine that is overrun by vampiric monsters. King uses Gothic Literary elements like gloomy decaying setting, supernatural beings, monsters, and phantoms, heroes, and intense emotions to round out the story and create a bond between the reader and the text.

Two years later his supernatural horror The Shining is published. A film adaptation of the story becomes a classic Hollywood horror.

Stephen King reinvigorated the vampire tale with ‘Salem’s Lot.. The author is praised for breathing new life into the traditional vampire story by incorporating modern fears and realistic settings. Two years later his supernatural horror The Shining is published.

Question 21

Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice

1976

Answer 21

Anne Rice establishes the idea of the ‘sympathetic vampire’.

Anne Rice establishes the idea of the ‘sympathetic vampire’ in her vampire couple, Louis and Lestat which are far removed from the traditional idea of the vampire.

This marked the beginning of the romantic vampire found in modern popular culture, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels. These achieve great popular success, reigniting interest in vampire tales and introducing Gothic to a new audience.

Question 22

The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter

1979

Answer 22

Carter’s collection of short stories is perhaps the most famous example of feminist Gothic. Her retelling of traditional children’s stories exposes some of the major Gothic themes, including incest, violence and the objectification of women.

Question 23

The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks

1984

Answer 23

The Wasp Factory is a modern gothic horror story about a psychopathic teenager living on a remote Scottish island.

The Wasp Factory is a Gothic novel: the island and the big old house are analogous to the Gothic castle, and both Frank and his father are grotesques, lonely people whose lives are steered by a single ‘truth’ which has become obsession

Written in the first person, the reader is taken into the extraordinary world of Frank and his peculiar rituals, obsessions and past times.

Question 24

House of Leaves

Mark Z Danielewski’s

2000

Answer 24

It is a labyrinthine book riddled with footnotes that weave throughout the text, multiple unreliable narrators, and frequently disorienting formatting

Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a contemporary novel that contains the four characteristics of the Gothic novel: architecture, death and decay, family secrets, and deviant sexuality.

It also contains some elements of the American Gothic such as mental instability and drugs and alcohol.

Question 25

The Crimson Petal and the White

Michel Faber

2002

Answer 25

Neo- Victorian novel

“In a sense all neo-Victorian novels are haunted. They are haunted by the ghosts of other texts and forms of writing, by authoritative voices from the past, by the spectral traces of Victorian characters whose actions still resonate within contemporary narratives, and by the shadows of histories and plots that resist closure.”

The tale of a prostitute named Sugar who uses her intelligence and her uncanny empathy to raise herself from the depths of a backstreet London brothel to the peripheries of respectable society.

The book paints a vivid portrait of Victorian England.

Question 26

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Answer 26

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