Gothic fiction

Around 1764 the first Gothic fiction novel, Castle of Otranto, was published and ever since genre seemed to gain more and more popularity. As it grew and developed, the genre came to be defined as a "neoclassical Enlightened Establishment”. I know that does not sound like English, so instead we can concentrate on the elements of Gothic fiction which are romance, foreign dark atmospheres and most importantly the supernatural element. So if a book talks about forbidden love between two educated handsome young people in some beautiful haunted European castle then it is probably gothic. After the castle of Otranto a lot of novels and more importantly writers came along. At first (that is in the 1800 let’s say) these writers seemed to be collecting folklore and combining it with classic Gothic literature elements and the results, fantastic. To prove it look at the books this time period produced, Edgar Allen Poe's tell tale heart, his fall of the house of usher, Bram stoker's Dracula not to mention the Brontes' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

A little later on parodies of Gothic fiction started to become popular as well, one example would be Jane Autsen's Northanger abbey, in this particular and I quote, " the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic." ¹ Nowadays Gothic fiction has been seriously modernised and all the forbidden love, fair maidens and young educated gentlemen were turned into, street dancers, school teachers and misunderstood teenagers. Now, some writers managed to pull this off without affecting the classic elements of the Gothic fiction or the image of some characters/creatures, examples include Stephen King's works, Anne Rice's works and some other novels like the Red Room by H.G.Wells. Others on the one hand have completely destroyed the image of a number of classic Gothic fiction protagonists/antagonists and released a wave of cheesy and quite dump novel , namely our darling dearest Stephenie Meyer.

So in short we can see that gothic fiction has almost always been a popular genre and will probably remain so.  We can also see that the plots and characters of this genre have gone through drastic changes at times resulting in amazing works and at other resulting in glittery disaster. At the end I would like to leave a small comment: next time you are in the library, hit the thriller section, look up some classics and read you will love it, promise.

Interesting facts: 

·         There are quite a number of novels that people read but do not know that they are classified as Gothic fiction, one example is a book taught in our school now and that is The Picture of Dorian Gray, another is Frankenstein.

·         Although the castle of Otranto is the official first gothic novel there is a number of gothic novels/plays the preceded it, such as Shakespeare's Macbeth, Bewolf and Faust.

Written by: Jude Khashman
With the help of: Shatha Degachi