![]() If you want to know more about how Gothic literature came into existence, a good start is to learn more about Walpole by visiting Strawberry Hill and having one of their excellent guided tours. But Walpole was very much an Englishman, and wanted to create something that was British as well as Gothic, and so he bought a small house in Strawberry Hill and turned it into a castle. Walpole had travelled widely in Europe, and was fascinated by the art and architecture of the Renaissance, which was the original ‘Gothic’ (to read more about this, have a look here). Scholars generally say that the first Gothic novel was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, though there are other contenders around the same time. Instead, like Frankenstein’s monster, it was cobbled together from bits and pieces in a desire to create something new. It comes from many places: Gothic literature isn’t a monolithic literary creature which was born, fully formed, and continued to exist in the same form. Gothic, then, is an assortment of literary tropes, symbols and aesthetics, mixed up with a lot of history, psychology and religion. She was right, but I haven’t managed to rename it! However, I did spend a lot of time thinking about how Gothic developed and where it came from, as well as where it is going to. When I was writing my PhD thesis, my supervisor suggested to me that ‘Gothic’ is a virtually meaningless term now, and it would be great if I could come up with a new word for it. ![]() However, let me try to clear up some of the misconceptions about Gothic literature. You don’t have to agree with me, though: my conclusion is that Gothic is a lot of things, often not all of them at once, and is remarkably difficult to define. I thought I would try to collect some of these discussions into a blog post. I seem to spend increasing amounts of time discussing what is Gothic, and what isn’t. ![]()
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