![]() The Gothic, then, concerns itself with the taboo. Although widely popular now, these tales were met with uproar at the time of publication and it is not difficult to see why these are novels that favoured science over religion, allowed the repressed “evil” of man to surface, and depicted overt homosexual desires. In this short period we suddenly have Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and many short stories which appeared in serialised form in Victorian periodicals. However, it is perhaps the last thirty years of the nineteenth century – widely regarded as the Fin-de-Siecle – where a succession of Gothic gems lie. The “deviance” of female sexuality is explicit in this novel, especially by Victorian standards, and paves the way for the vampire as a sexual metaphor. ![]() Although influenced by Coleridge’s unfinished poem Christabel, Carmilla is influential in its own right. Our next Gothic novel appears in 1871 with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Exposing how women are often trapped in a domestic space and dominated by men, the novel was both celebrated and detested. The middle of the century saw the emergence of Female Gothic with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Mystery and horror pervades this tale and indeed it is this that most paved the way for future Gothic tales ambiguity and the power of the reader’s imagination is vital in conjuring the terrors lurking in the Gothic shadows. Set in a labyrinth Medieval Italian castle, the tale is steeped in the supernatural, romance and murder. Its core elements became staples of Gothic fiction. Written in 1764, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is generally thought to be the first Gothic novel. Its popularity grew rapidly throughout the nineteenth century and it is this, I believe, that triggered the settings for many great Gothic novels throughout the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. This style gradually died out, but was revived shortly after during the Gothic Revival of the 18th century. Most prominent in great cathedrals and churches, the Gothic architecture appealed to the emotions a sense of greatness, of the sublime. ![]() The term wasn’t first used, though, until the Renaissance (14th-17th centuries). The Gothic originated as a style of medieval architecture that flourished in France between the 12th and 16th centuries.
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