Gothic narrative

First page The Castle of Otrantoconsidered the first Gothic novel

The Gothic narrative is a literary genre originating in England at the end of the 18th century, related to the horror genre. Gothic fiction or narrative, which is widely known by the gothic horror subgenre, is a genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and sometimes romance. Its origin is attributed to the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, which bore the subtitle (in its second edition) of "A Gothic Story". Gothic fiction tends to place an emphasis on both emotion and a pleasurable type of horror, serving as an extension to the romantic literary movement that was relatively new at the time Walpole's novel was published. The most common of these "pleasures" among Gothic readers it was that of the "sublime," an indescribable feeling that "takes us beyond ourselves."

The literary genre originated in England in the second half of the 18th century, where, following Walpole, it was developed by Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford and Matthew Lewis. The genre was very successful in the 19th century, as witnessed in prose by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Charles Dickens's novel, A Christmas Carol. , and in poetry the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron. Another well-known novel in this genre, dating from the late Victorian era, is Dracula by Bram Stoker.

The name "Gothic", which originally referred to the Goths, and later came to mean "German," refers to the Gothic architecture from the medieval period of European history, in which many of these stories take place. This extreme form of romanticism was very popular throughout Europe, especially among English and German-language writers and artists. The English Gothic novel also gave rise to new types of novels such as the German Schauerroman and the French roman noir. epistolary (letter), has an intense descriptive charge called Reality Effect, among many others.

Introduction

The adjective Gothic derives from godo, and, indeed, in the context of this literary subgenre, most of the stories take place in medieval castles and monasteries. In a strict sense, Gothic horror was a literary fashion, of fundamentally Anglo-Saxon origin, which extended from the late 18th century to end of the XIX century, as a reaction to Rationalism. In modern horror literature the old archetypes have not totally disappeared.

The Gothic movement emerged in England at the end of the 18th century. The Gothic renaissance was the emotional, aesthetic and philosophical expression that reacted against the dominant thought of the Enlightenment, according to which humanity would be capable, only through the use of Reason, of reaching true knowledge and perfect happiness and virtue.; although Romanticism would show that such an insatiable appetite for knowledge left aside the idea that fear could also be sublime.

The orderly ideas of the Enlightenment are being relegated and giving way to a fondness for Gothic in England and thus the path is being opened for the foundation of a school of this type of literature, derived from German models.

Gothic narratives abound between 1765 and 1820, with the iconography that is familiar to us: cemeteries, wastelands and gloomy castles full of mysteries, infernal villains, werewolves, vampires, doppelgänger (transmuters, or double personality) and demons, etc...

The ingredients of this subgenre are haunted castles, crypts, ghosts or monsters, as well as storms and tempests, night life and the simple gruesome detail, all of which often arise from popular legends. The founding work of Gothic is The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole (1765). Other key works of this current are Vathek (1786), by William Beckford, The Mysteries of Udolf (1794), by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, published in 1796, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), by Charles Robert Maturin and Manuscript Found in Zaragoza by Jan Potocki. Romanticism thoroughly explored this literature, almost always inspiring a negro with morbid and distressing feelings, which reached its maximum splendor in the 19th century span>, prompted by the discovery of the morbid game with the unconscious.

Although Jules Verne cultivated above all the adventure and science fiction genres, there is a little-known novel of his that has the characteristics of the Gothic novel: The Castle of the Carpathians. Said novel is considered a "rare avis" in Verne's production and is usually considered his only foray into the Gothic novel genre, bringing together all the elements that characterize it: a spooky abandoned castle, a beautiful opera singer supposedly kidnapped by an evil nobleman (Baron Gortz), a hero in love willing to rescue her until he goes mad, popular superstitions about ghosts and apparitions, etc... Written five years before Dracula, it shares many elements with the work of Bram Stoker.

Frontispicio a Frankenstein, edition 1831

Works from the mid-century XIX, such as Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe, and, later, "Janet of the Wry Neck" by R. L. Stevenson, "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, Another Turn of the Screw by Henry James, etc., it can be said that they go far beyond Gothic terror, as they either go further, or do not meet the aforementioned characteristics. Except in exceptional cases, they tend to the short story format to the detriment of the novel; bloody nuns are not used, nor are spectral howls and thunder, lightning and storm flashes necessary elements; They do not have to take place in dilapidated settings, castles and medieval monasteries; the ghosts they present are not "chained"; they barely have anything to do with popular legends... Therefore they can be considered as fully representative works of modern terror that will reach our days, although critics' opinion is divided on this point.

In the truly Gothic stories, a latent eroticism and a love for the decadent and ruinous can be seen. Deep depression, anguish, loneliness, sick love, appear in these texts linked to the occult and the supernatural. Most of the authors maintain that the gothic has been the father of the horror genre, which later exploited the phenomenon of fear with less interest in the feelings of depression, decadence and exaltation of the ruinous and macabre that were the hallmark of literature. gothic romantic, and more emphasis on other elements.

The Spanish romantic Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870) was also a horror writer, who included in his Legends some highly meritorious scary stories such as Maese Pérez, the Organist, El Miserere and El Monte de las Ánimas.

At the end of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde took up this subgenre with humor in his short story The Canterville Ghost .

The Songs of Maldoror, by Isidore Ducasse —count of Lautréamont— is a work considered a precursor of surrealism. However, it contains narrative elements that make it possible to trace features and influences of works such as Melmoth the Wanderer , as Marcelyn Pleynet points out in her study of Lautréamont. In the case of Maldoror, this is presented as a being that stalks men through metamorphosis. Maurice Blanchot and Gaston Bachelard analyze the bestiary of animal forms adopted by Maldoror; This one usually calls himself with the nicknames of: "the vampire", "the one who does not know how to cry", "the Montevidean", among others.

Already in the 20th century, the American writer Anne Rice, whose works mix the everyday with stories of vampires and dark eroticism, has tried to revitalize, thematically, gothic terror. H. P. Lovecraft, for his part, would manage to synthesize in the first decades of the XX century the tradition that started from the Gothic with science contemporary fiction. Currently, very fashionable again for the cinema, the gothic has been rescued by Anglo-Saxon authors (at least in certain works) such as Angela Carter, P. McGrath, A. S. Byatt, etc.

Precursors

The conventions of Gothic literature were not invented in the 18th century by Horace Walpole. The components that would eventually combine into Gothic literature had a rich history already when Walpole published the fictional medieval manuscript of it in The Castle of Otranto in 1764.

Mysterious imagination

Gothic literature is often described with words like “horror” and “wow” This sense of wonder and terror, providing the suspension of disbelief that is so important to the Gothic genre (which, for all its occasional melodrama, typically played seriously except when parodied), requires that the reader's imagination be willing to accept the idea that there might be something "beyond what is immediately in front of us." The mysterious imagination necessary for Gothic literature to gain any ground had been building for some time before the advent of the Gothic genre. This need arose when the known world began to be further explored, reducing the geographic mysteries inherent in the world. The edges of the map were starting to fill in and no one was finding dragons yet. The human mind needed a replacement. Clive Bloom theorizes that this gap in the collective imagination was instrumental in developing the cultural possibility of the rise of the Gothic tradition.

Medievalism

The setting for most early Gothic plays was medieval, but this had been a common theme long before Walpole. In Britain especially, there was a desire to reclaim a shared past. This obsession frequently led to extravagant architectural displays and mock tournaments were sometimes held. It was not only in literature that a medieval revival was felt, and this also contributed to a culture ready to accept in 1764 a work that was perceived as medieval.

The macabre and morbid

The gothic genre often uses scenes of decay, death, and morbidity to achieve its effects (especially in the Italian gothic school of horror). However, Gothic literature was not the origin of this tradition; in fact, it was much older. The corpses, skeletons and cemeteries so commonly associated with the early Gothic genre were popularized by graveyard poets, and were also present in novels such as Daniel Defoe's Diary of the Plague Year, which contains scenes cartoons of plague carts and piles of corpses of plague victims. Even earlier, poets like Edmund Spenser evoked a gloomy, forlorn atmosphere in poems like Epithalamion.

Emotional aesthetics

All of the aspects of pre-Gothic literature mentioned above occur to some degree in Gothic, but even taken together, they still fall short of true Gothic. What was missing was an aesthetic that would serve to unite the elements. Bloom notes that this aesthetic must take the form of a theoretical or philosophical core, which is necessary to "save the best short stories from becoming mere anecdotes or incoherent sensationalism". In this particular case, the aesthetic it had to be emotional, one that was finally provided by Edmund Burke's 1757 work, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful, which "ultimately codified the gothic emotional experience'. Specifically, Burke's ideas about the sublime, terror, and darkness were highly applicable. These sections can be summarized as follows: the Sublime is that which is or produces the "strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling", the Sublime is most often evoked by Terror, and to cause Terror we need some measure of Darkness—we can't know everything about what induces Terror—or else "much of the apprehension fades away." Darkness is necessary to experience the Terror of the unknown. Bloom claims that Burke's descriptive vocabulary was essential to the romantic works that eventually informed the Gothic genre.

Political influences

The birth of the Gothic genre was believed to be influenced by the beginning of political turmoil. Researchers have linked its birth with the English Civil War and culminating in a Jacobite rebellion (1745) shortly before the first Gothic novel (1764). A collective political memory and the deep cultural fears associated with it likely contributed to early Gothic villainous characters as literary representatives of defeated Tory (Tory) barons or 'rising' royalists; from their political graves in the pages of early Gothic to terrify the bourgeois reader of late 18th century England England.

Early Gothic Romances

Horace Walpole

The novel generally regarded as the first Gothic novel is The Castle of Otranto by English author Horace Walpole, which was first published in 1764. Walpole's stated purpose was to combine elements of romance medieval, which he considered too fanciful, and the modern novel, which he considered too confined to strict realism. The basic plot created many other of the essential generic traits of Gothic, including menacing mysteries and ancestral curses, as well as countless hidden rooms or corridors and frequently fainting heroines.

Walpole published the first edition under the guise of a medieval Italian romance that would have been discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. When Walpole admitted authorship in the second edition, the novel's originally favorable reception by literary critics turned to rejection. The critics' rejection reflected a broader cultural bias: romance was often scorned by the educated as a vulgar and debased type of writing; the genre had gained some respectability only through the works of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. A romance with superstitious elements and furthermore devoid of didactic intent, it was considered backward and unacceptable. Walpole's forgery, along with the mixture of history and fiction, contravened Enlightenment principles and gave the Gothic novel an association with forged documentation.

Clara Reeve

Clara Reeve, best known for her play The Old English Baron (1778), set out to take Walpole's plot and adapt it to the demands of the period balancing fantastical elements with realism of the 18th century. In his preface, Reeve wrote: " This story is the literary daughter of The Castle of Otranto, written on the same plan, with a design that unites the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and the modern novel". question whether supernatural events not as patently absurd as Walpole's would not lead simpler minds to believe that they were possible.

Reeve's contribution to the development of Gothic fiction can therefore be shown on at least two fronts. In the first, there is the reinforcement of the Gothic narrative framework, which focuses on expanding the imaginative domain to include the supernatural without losing the realism that marks Walpole's pioneering novel. Second, Reeve also sought to contribute to the search for the adequate formula for the fiction to be credible and coherent. The result is that he rejected specific aspects of Walpole's style, such as its tendency to incorporate too much humor or comic elements in such a way as to diminish the gothic tale's ability to induce fear. In 1777, Reeve listed Walpole's excesses in this regard:

a sword so great that a hundred men would be needed to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight force a step through a courtyard towards a arched vault, big enough for a man to pass; a painting that comes out of its frame; a ghostly skeleton with an hermit's hood...

Although the succession of gothic writers didn't exactly heed Reeve's focus on emotional realism, he was able to come up with a framework that kept gothic fiction within the realm of probability. This aspect remains a challenge for authors in this genre after the publication of The Old English Baron. Taken out of its providential context, the supernatural would often risk veering into the absurd.

Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe developed the technique of the supernatural explained in which every seemingly supernatural intrusion can ultimately be traced to natural causes. Radcliffe has been called both "the Great Enchantress" as "Mother Radcliffe" due to its influence on both Gothic and Women's Gothic literature. Radcliffe's use of visual elements and their effects constitutes an innovative strategy for reading the world through "visual linguistic patterns" and developing an "ethical gaze". ”, allowing readers to visualize the events through words, understand the situations, and feel the terror the characters themselves are experiencing.

Its success attracted many imitators. Among other elements, Ann Radcliffe introduced the taciturn figure of the Gothic villain (in A Sicilian Romance of 1790), a literary device that would become to be defined as the Byronic hero. Radcliffe's novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolf (1794), were best sellers. However, along with most novels of the day, they were scorned by many educated people as tabloid nonsense.

Radcliffe also inspired the emerging idea of "Gothic feminism," which she expressed through the idea of female power through feigned and staged weakness. The establishment of this idea started the women's gothic movement to "challenge... the very concept of gender".

Radcliffe also provided an aesthetic for the genre in an influential article "On the Supernatural in Poetry," which examines the distinction and correlation between horror and terror in Gothic fiction, using the uncertainties of terror in his works to produce a model of the haunting. Combining experiences of terror and wonder with visual description was a technique that pleased readers and set Radcliffe apart from other Gothic writers.

William Beckford

In his novel Vathek (1786), originally written in French, Beckford capitalized on the obsession of the 18th century for everything oriental, combining it with the gothic styles of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

Other novels from this period

• 1789, Zeluco: Various Views of Human Nature, Taken from Life and Manners, Foreign and Domestic by John Moore
• 1793, Castle of Wolfenbach Eliza Parsons
• 1794, The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest of "Ludwig Flammenberg" (pseudonym of Friedrich Carl Kahlert)
• 1794, The Cavern of Death, Anonymous
• 1795, The Castle of Ollada of Francis Lathom
• 1796, The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale Eliza Parsons
• 1796, Horrid Mysteries of Peter Will
• 1796, The Mystery of the Black Tower John Palmer

Translation as framed narrative

At least two Gothic authors use the literary concept of translation as a framed narrative device for their novels. Ann Radcliffe's gothic novel The Italian features a weighty framed narrative, in which its narrator claims that the story the reader is about to hear has been recorded and translated from a manuscript entrusted to an Italian by a close friend who heard the story in a confession in a church. Radcliffe uses this translation framework to give evidence of how his extraordinary story has reached the reader. In the fictional preface to his gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole claims that his story was composed in Italy, recorded in German, later discovered and translated into English. Walpole's story of transnational translation gives his novel an air of tantalizing exoticism that is very characteristic of the Gothic genre.

Contemporary developments in Germany, France and Russia

Romantic literary movements were developing in continental Europe at the same time as the Gothic novel was developing. In this way, the English Gothic novel also gave rise to new types of novels such as the German Schauerroman and the French roman noir.

Germany

The term Schauerroman is sometimes equated with the term "Gothic novel", but this is only partly true. Both genres draw on the scary side of the Middle Ages, and both often feature the same elements (castles, ghosts, monsters, etc.). However, the key elements of the Schauerroman are necromancy and secret societies and it is noticeably more pessimistic than the British Gothic novel. All these elements are the basis of Friedrich von Schiller's unfinished novel, Der Geisterseher – Aus den Papieren des Grafen von O ("He Who Sees Ghosts", 1786-1789). The theme of secret societies is also present in Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1791-1794) and in Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann (Rinaldo Rinaldini, the Thief Captain). (1797) by Christian August Vulpius.

The genres of the Gespensterroman/Geisterroman ("ghost novel"), Räuberroman ("novel of Thieves") and Ritterroman ("novel of chivalry") also frequently share plot and motifs with the "Gothic novel" british.

As its name suggests, the Räuberroman focuses on the life and deeds of outlaws, influenced by Friedrich von Schiller's drama The Bandits (1781). Abällino, der grosse Bandit (1793) by Heinrich Zschokke was translated into English by Matthew Lewis as The Brave of Venice in 1804.

The Ritterroman focuses on the lives and exploits of knights and soldiers, but features many elements found in the Gothic novel, such as magic, secret courts, and a medieval setting. The novel Hermann de Unna (1788) by Benedikte Naubert is considered to be very close to the Schauerroman genre.

Other early authors and works included Christian Heinrich Spiess, with his works Das Petermännchen (1793), Der alte Überall und Nirgends (1792), Die Löwenritter (1794) and Hans Heiling, verter und letzter Regent der Erd- Luft- Feuer- und Wasser-Geister (1798). Similarly, Heinrich von Kleist's short story "Das Bettelweib von Locarno" (The Locarno Beggar, 1797) and Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert, the blond, 1797) and Der Runenberg (1804) by Ludwig Tieck Early examples of Gothic writing by women include Das höfliche Gespenst (1797) and Sophie Albrecht's Graumännchen oder die Burg Rabenbühl: eine Geistergeschichte altteutschen Ursprungs (1799).

France

The roman noir ("noir novel") appeared in France, by writers such as François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Baculard d'Arnaud and Madame de Genlis.

The Marquis de Sade used a sub-Gothic setting for some of his fictional works, notably Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) and Eugenie de Franval, although the marquis himself never thought of his works in this way. Sade criticized the genre in the preface to his Reflections on the Novel (1800) stating that the Gothic is "the inevitable product of the revolutionary clash with which he resonated throughout Europe". Contemporary critics of the genre also noted the correlation between the terror of the French Revolution and the "terrorist school" of writing represented in Radcliffe and Lewis.

Russia

Russian Gothic was not seen as a genre or label by Russian critics until the 1990s. When used, the word "Gothic" was used to describe the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly the early ones. Most critics simply used labels such as "Romanticism" and "Fantastique", as in the 1984 short story collection Фантастический мир русской романтической повести, literally, "The Fantastic World of Russian Romantic Short Stories and Novels. From the 1980s, Russian Gothic fiction as a genre began to be discussed in books such as The Gothic-Fantastic in Nine 19th-Century Russian Literature, European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960, The Russian Gothic novel and its British antecedents and Goticheskiy roman v Rossii (The Gothic novel in Russia). The first Russian author whose work has been described as Gothic fiction is considered to be Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin. While many of his works feature Gothic elements, the first to be considered to fall exclusively under the Gothic fiction label is Ostrov Borngolm (Isle of Borngolm) of 1793. Then, almost 10 years later, Nikolai Ivanovich Gnedich did the same with his novel Don Corrado de Gerrera from 1803, set in Spain during the reign of Philip II.

Matthew Lewis and the turn of the century

English novelist Matthew Lewis's lurid tale of monastic debauchery, black magic, and Satanism entitled The Monk (1796) ushered in the continental mode of "horror" to England. Lewis's portrayal of depraved monks, sadistic inquisitors, and spectral nuns—and his insulting perspective on the Catholic Church—shocked some readers, but The Monk was important to the development of the genre.

The Monk even influenced Ann Radcliffe in her last novel, The Italian (1797). In this book, the hapless protagonists find themselves caught in a web of deceit by an evil monk named Schedoni and are eventually brought before the courts of the Inquisition in Rome, leading a contemporary to comment that if Radcliffe wished to transcend the horror of these scenes, he would have to visit hell itself.

In 1799, the philosopher William Godwin wrote St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (Saint Leon: A Story of the 16th Century), which influenced St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian ( Saint Irvyne or El Rosicrucian , 1811) by Godwin's future son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley, and in Frankenstein (1818), which was Dedicated to Godwin and written by his daughter Mary Shelley.

Anglo-Irish women authors also wrote Gothic fiction in the 19th century, including Regina Maria Roche, whose novel Clermont (1798) went through several editions, and Sydney Owenson, best known for The Wild Irish Girl (1806).

Gothic novels abound in this era, by publishers like Minerva Press:

• 1798, The Orphan of the Rhine of Eleanor Sleath
• 1798, The Midnight Bell of Francis Lathom
• 1798, Edgar; or, The Phantom of the Castle by Richard Sicklemore
• 1798, The Animated Skeleton, anonymous
• 1799, The Abbess of William Henry Ireland
• 1799, Ethelvina; or, The House of Fitz-Auburnerf of T. J. Horsley Curties
• 1801, Lusignan; or, The Abbaye of La Trappe, anonymous
• 1801, Martyn of Fenrose; or, The Wizard and the Sword Henry Summersett
• 1802, Who's the Murderer of Eleanor Sleath
• 1802, Astonishment!!! of Francis Lathom
• 1806, The Mystic Sepulchre John Palmer, Jr.
• 1806, The Castle of Berry Pomeroy of Edward Montague
• 1807, The Fatal Vow; or, St. Michael's Monastery of Francis Lathom
• 1807, The Demon of Sicily of Edward Montague
• 1808, The Witch of Ravensworth by George Brewer
• 1809, Ennui of Maria Edgeworth
• 1809, Manfroné; or, The One-Handed Monk by Mary Ann Radcliffe
• 1810, Zastrozzi: A Romance by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 1811, Pyrenean Banditti of Eleanor Sleath
• 1811, The Caledonian Bandit; or, The Heir of Duncaethal by Mrs. Smith
• 1811, The Mysterious Hand, or, Subterranean Horrours! of Augustus Jacob Crandolph
• 1813, The Forest of Valancourt; or, The Haunt of the Banditti of Peter Middleton Darling
• 1814, The Vaults of Lepanto of T. R. Tuckett
• 1815, Barozzi; or, The Venetian Sorceress by Mrs. Smith

Gothic tales also began to appear in women's magazines such as The Lady's Monthly Museum (1798-1832).

Other contributions to the Gothic genre were seen in the work of the first generation of Romantic poets: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Christabel (1816) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The term "Gothic" it is also sometimes used to describe the ballads of Russian authors such as Vasili Zhukovsky, particularly "Ludmila" (1808) and "Svetlana" (1813).

First parodies

The excesses, stereotypes, and frequent absurdities of traditional Gothic made it fertile ground for satire. The most famous parody of Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much gothic fiction, conceives of herself as a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy all over the place, even though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic. Jane Austen's novel is valuable for including a list of early Gothic works known ever since as Northanger Horrid Novels. These books, with their lurid titles, were once thought to be the figments of Jane Austen's imagination, but subsequent research by Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers confirmed that they really did exist and spurred a renewed interest in the Gothic. All are currently being reprinted.

Another example of a Gothic parody in a similar vein is The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813). Cherry Wilkinson, a fatuous protagonist with a passion for reading novels, imagines herself as the heroine of a gothic romance. She perceives and models reality according to the typical stereotypes and plot structures of the Gothic novel, which leads to a series of absurd events that culminate in a catastrophe. After her downfall, her affectations and excessive imaginations are eventually subdued by the voice of reason in the form of Stuart, a father figure, under whose guidance the protagonist receives a solid education and correction of misguided taste. her.

Second generation or Jüngere Romantik

Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus Mary Shelley (1818) has come to define Gothic fiction in the romantic period. The frontispiece of the 1831 edition is shown.

Poetry, romantic adventures, and the character of Lord Byron, described by his spurned mistress Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, wicked and dangerous to meet," were another inspiration for the Gothic, providing the archetype of the Byronic hero. Byron even appears as the main character in Lady Caroline's gothic novel, Glenarvon (1816).

Byron also hosted the famous ghost story contest involving himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. This occasion had as a result both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampire, which included the Byronic Lord Ruthven. The Vampire has been considered by cultural critic Christopher Frayling to be one of the most influential works of fiction ever written and sparked a fever for vampire fiction and plays (and later cinema). of vampires that has not ceased to this day. Mary Shelley's novel, while clearly influenced by the Gothic tradition, is often considered the first science fiction novel, despite the novel's omission of any scientific explanation. on the animation of the monster and the emphasis, instead, on the moral issues and consequences of such a creation.

In poetry, there are also La Belle Dame sin Merci (1819) and Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1820), by John Keats, which mysteriously describe to fairies and ghosts. In the last poem, the names of the characters, the dream visions, and the macabre physical details are influenced by the early Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe.

A late example of traditional Gothic is Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which combines themes of anti-Catholicism with an outcast Byronic hero. The mummy! by Jane Wells Loudon (1827) features standard Gothic motifs, characters, and plot, but with a significant twist: it is set in the 22nd century and speculates on fantastic scientific developments that could have occurred four hundred years in the future, making it one one of the earliest examples, along with Frankenstein, of the science fiction genre developing out of Gothic traditions.

Rest of Europe

The viyi, lord of the underworld, of the homonym tale of Gogol

For two decades, the most famous author of Gothic literature in Germany was the polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann. His novel The Devil's Elixirs (1815) was influenced by Lewis's novel The Monk, and he even mentions it within the book. The novel also explores the motif of the doppelgänger, the term coined by another German author (and follower of Hoffmann), Jean Paul in his humorous novel Siebenkäs (1796-1797). He also wrote an opera based on the Gothic tale Undine (1816) by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, for which de la Motte Fouqué himself wrote the libretto. Apart from Hoffmann and de la Motte Fouqué, Three other important authors of the time were Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (The Marble Statue, 1819), Ludwig Achim von Arnim (Die Majoratsherren, or The Owners of the estate, 1819) and Adelbert von Chamisso (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 1814). After them, Wilhelm Meinhold wrote The Amber Witch (1838) and Sidonia von Bork (1847).

In Spain, the priest Pascual Pérez Rodríguez was the most assiduous Gothic novelist, closely aligned with Ann Radcliffe's notion of the supernatural explained. At the same time, the poet José de Espronceda published The Student of Salamanca (1837-1840), a narrative poem that presents a horrific variation on the legend of Don Juan.

Viy, Lord of the Underworld, from Gogol's story of the same name

In Russia, authors of the Romantic era include: Antony Pogorelsky (pen name of Alexey Alexeyevich Perovsky), Orest Somov, Oleksa Storozhenko, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoy, Mikhail Lermontov (for his work Stuss) and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bestuzhev. Pushkin is particularly important, as his 1833 short story "The Queen of Spades" it was so popular that it was adapted into operas and later into films by Russian and foreign artists. Portions of "A Hero of Our Time" (1840) by Mikhail Lermontov are also considered to belong to the Gothic genre, but lack the supernatural elements of other Russian Gothic stories. The following poems are also now considered to be in the Gothic genre: "Lila" from Meshchevskiy, "Olga" from Katenin, "The Groom" from Pushkin, "The Gravedigger" of Pletnev and "Demon" by Lermontov (1829-1839).

The key author of the transition from Romanticism to Realism, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, who was also one of the most important authors of Romanticism, produced a number of works that qualify as Gothic fiction. In each of his three short story collections, he features a number of stories that belong to the Gothic genre, as well as many stories that contain Gothic elements. They include: "La eve de San Juan" and "A terrible revenge" from Evenings in a Dikanka Farmhouse (1831-1832); "The Portrait" of the Arabesques (1835); and "The viyi" from Mirgorod (1835). While all of these tales are well known, it is this last one that is probably the most famous, having inspired at least eight film adaptations (two of which are now considered lost), one animated feature, two documentaries, and one video game. Gogol's work differs from Western European Gothic fiction in that his cultural influences were derived from Ukrainian folklore, the Cossack lifestyle, and, being a highly religious man, Orthodox Christianity.

Other notable authors of the Gogol era include Vladimir Odoyevsky (The Living Corpse, written 1838, published 1844; The Phantom; The Sylph; as well as short stories), Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (The Vurdalak Family, 1839, and The Vampire, 1841), Mikhail Zagoskin (Guests Unexpected), Osip Senkovsky (Antar) and Yevgueni Baratynski (The Ring).

During the Victorian Era

By the Victorian era, Gothic had ceased to be the dominant genre in England and was rejected by most critics. In fact, the popularity of the form as an established genre had already begun to erode with the success of the historical novel popularized by Sir Walter Scott. In other ways, however, Gothic was entering its most creative phase. Readers and critics had begun to reconsider a number of "penny dreadfuls" previously overlooked, from authors such as George W. M. Reynolds, who wrote a trilogy of Gothic horror novels: Faust (1846), Wagner the Wehr-wolf (1847) and The Necromancer (1857). Reynolds was also responsible for The Mysteries of London (1844), which has been given an important place in the development of the urban as a Gothic setting, particularly Victorian, an area within which interesting links can be made with established readings of the work of Dickens and others. Another famous penny dreadful from this era was Varney the Vampire (1847). Varney is the story of the vampire Sir Francis Varney, and it introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable by modern audiences: it was, for example, the first story to refer to a vampire's sharp teeth. The formal relationship between these fictions, serialized for predominantly working-class audiences, and the more or less contemporary sensation fictions serialized in magazines aimed at the middle class is also an area of research.

A major and innovative reinterpretation of Gothic in this period was the American Edgar Allan Poe. Poe focused less on the traditional elements of gothic stories and more on the psychology of his characters, who often descended into madness. Poe's critics complained of his "German" tales, to which he replied, "Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul." Poe, himself a critic, believed that terror was a legitimate literary subject. The story of his & # 34;The Fall of the House of Usher & # 34; (1839) explores these "terrors of the soul" while revisiting classic Gothic tropes of aristocratic decay, death, and madness. The legendary villainy of the Spanish Inquisition, previously explored by goths Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin, appears, based on a true survivor's account in &# 34;The Well and the Pendulum" (1842). The influence of Ann Radcliffe is also detectable in "The Oval Portrait" by Poe (1842), which includes an honorary mention of her name in the text of the story.

Like Poe, the Spanish writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was noted for his romantic poems and short stories, some of them about supernatural events. Today he is considered by some to be the most widely read writer in Spanish after Miguel de Cervantes.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) transports the Gothic style to the mighty Yorkshire moors, featuring ghostly apparitions and a Byronic hero in the form of the demonic Heathcliff. The fiction of the Brontës is seen by some feminist critics as prime examples of feminine gothic, exploring the entrapment of women within the domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restraint. Emily's Cathy and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre are examples of female leads in that role. Louisa May Alcott's mediocre gothic play A Long Fatal Love Chase (written in 1866, but published in 1995) is also an interesting example of this subgenre.

Elizabeth Gaskell's short stories "The Doom of the Griffiths" (1858) "Lois the Witch" and "The Gray Woman" they employ one of the most common themes of gothic fiction, the power of ancestral sins to curse future generations or the fear that they will.

The genre was also highly influential among more mainstream writers, such as Charles Dickens, who read Gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their bleak atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, shifting them to a more modern period and urban setting, including Oliver Twist (1837-18), Bleak House (1854) and Great Expectations (1860-1861). These aimed at the juxtaposition of a rich, orderly and prosperous civilization together with the disorder and barbarism of the poor within the same metropolis. Bleak House, in particular, is credited with introducing urban fog into the novel, which would become a frequent feature of urban Gothic literature and film. His most explicitly Gothic work is his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he did not complete in his lifetime and which was published in an unfinished state at his death in 1870.

The mood and themes of the Gothic novel especially captivated the Victorians, with their obsession with mourning rituals, mementos mori, and mortality in general.

Catholic Irish also wrote Gothic fiction in the 19th century, so while some Anglo-Irish were to dominate and define the subgenre decades later, they didn't make it their own. Gothic Catholic Irish writers included Gerald Griffin, James Clarence Mangan, and John and Michael Banim. William Carleton was a noted Gothic writer, but he converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism during his lifetime, which complicates his position in this dichotomy.

In German, Jeremias Gotthelf wrote Die schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider, 1842), an allegorical work that used Gothic themes. The last work of the German writer Theodor Storm, Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider of the White Horse, 1888), also uses Gothic motifs and themes.

After Gogol, Russian literature saw the rise of realism, but many authors continued to write stories that fell within the territory of Gothic fiction. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, one of the most famous realists, wrote Faust (1856), Ghosts (1864), Pesn torzhestvuyushchey lyubvi ( Song of Triumphant Love, 1881) and Klara Milich (1883). Another classical Russian realist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, incorporated Gothic elements into many of his works, although none of his novels are considered purely Gothic. Grigori Danilevsky, who wrote early science fiction and historical novels and short stories, wrote Mertvec-ubiytsa (Dead Murderer) in 1879. In addition, Grigori Machtet wrote the story "Zaklyatiy kazak", which can now also be considered Gothic.

Late 19th century and early 20th century

The 1880s saw the revival of Gothic as a powerful literary form allied to the fin de siècle, which fictionalized contemporary fears such as ethical degeneracy and questioned the social structures of the time. Classic works of this urban gothic include Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde, Trilby by George du Maurier (1894), The Beetle by Richard Marsh (1897), The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898) and the stories of Arthur Machen.

In Ireland, gothic fiction tended to be the supply of Anglo-Irish Protestant rule. According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker form the core of the Irish Gothic subgenre with stories featuring castles set in an arid landscape and a cast of remote aristocrats dominating an atavistic peasantry, depicted in allegorical form. the difficult political situation of colonial Ireland under Protestant rule. Le Fanu's use of the shadowy villain, the forbidden mansion and the hunted heroine in Uncle Silas (1864) shows the direct influence of the Walpole's Otranto and Radcliffe's Udolfo. Le Fanu's collection of short stories In a Glass Darkly (In a mysterious glass, 1872) includes the superlative vampire tale Carmilla, which provided fresh blood for that particular strand of gothic and influenced Bram Stoker's vampire novel, Dracula (1897). Stoker's book not only created the most famous Gothic villain in history, Count Dracula, but also established Transylvania and Eastern Europe as the locus classicus of the Gothic.

In the United States, two notable writers of the late XIX century, of gothic, were Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers. Bierce's tales were in the horrifying and pessimistic tradition of Poe. Chambers, in contrast, indulged in the decadent style of Wilde and Machen, even to the point of including a character named 'Wilde' in his role. in his The King in Yellow (1895).

In Canada, some of the works of writer Gilbert Parker also belong to the genre, including the stories of The Lane that Had No Turning (1900).

In France there is the short story The Horla by Guy de Maupassant (1887), and the serialized novel The Phantom of the Opera (1909-1910) by the writer Gaston Leroux is another well-known example of Gothic fiction from the early 20th century.

In Germany, at the beginning of the 20th century, many authors wrote works influenced by the Schauerroman, including Hanns Heinz Ewers.

In Russia, during the last years of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, many authors continued to write in the Gothic fiction genre. These include historian and historical fiction writer Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, Leonid Andreyev, who developed psychological characterization, symbolist Valery Bryusov, Aleksandr Grin, Anton Chekhov and Aleksandr Kuprin. Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin wrote Sukhodo′l (Dry Valley, 1912), which is considered to be influenced by Gothic literature. In her monograph on the subject, Muireann Maguire writes: "The centrality of the Gothic-fantastic in Russian fiction is almost impossible to exaggerate, and certainly exceptional in the context of world literature".

After World War I

Gothic fiction and modernism influenced each other. This is often most evident in the detective novel, horror fiction, and science fiction, but the influence of the Gothic can also be seen in high century literary modernism XX. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, initiated the reworking of older literary forms and myths that becomes commonplace in the work of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, among others. In Joyce's Ulysses (1922), the living are transformed into ghosts, pointing to an Ireland in stasis at the time, but also to a history of cycles of trauma since the Great Famine in the 1840s to the present time of the text. The way in which Ulysses uses tropes from the Gothic, such as ghosts and apparitions, while removing the literally supernatural elements of Gothic fiction of the XIX, is indicative of the general form of modernist Gothic script of the first half of the XX.

In the United States, pulp magazines such as Weird Tales reprinted classic gothic horror tales from the previous century, by authors such as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and printed new stories from modern authors with both traditional and new horrors. The most significant of these was H. P. Lovecraft, who also wrote an overview of the gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936), as well as developing a Mythos that would influence Gothic and contemporary horror well into the XXI century. Lovecraft's protégé Robert Bloch contributed to Weird Tales and wrote Psycho (1959), which drew on classical interests in the genre. From these, the Gothic genre per se gave way to modern horror fiction, considered by some literary critics to be a branch of Gothic, although others use the term to encompass the entire genre.

The romantic side of Gothic was taken up again in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), which some consider to have been influenced by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Du Maurier, like The Jamaica Inn (1936), also show Gothic tendencies. Du Maurier's work inspired a substantial body of "feminine goths," about heroines who either swooned or were terrorized by scowling Byronic men, owning acres of prime real estate and having their corresponding droit du seigneur.

Southern Gothic

The genre also influenced American lyrics to create the Southern Gothic genre, which blends some Gothic sensibilities (such as the grotesque) with the setting and style of the American South. Examples include Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, John Kennedy Toole, Manly Wade Wellman, Eudora Welty, Rhodi Hawk, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, Davis Grubb, Anne Rice, Harper Lee, and Cormac. McCarthy.

New Gothic Romances

Gothic romances of this description became popular during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with authors such as Phyllis A. Whitney, Joan Aiken, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, Mary Stewart, and Jill Tattersall. Many included covers showing a terrified woman in a quasi-transparent outfit in front of a gloomy castle, often with only a single lighted window. Many were published under the Paperback Library Gothic imprint and were marketed to a female audience. Although the authors were mostly women, some men wrote gothic romances under female pen names. For example, the prolific Clarissa Ross and Marilyn Ross were pen names for Dan Ross, and Frank Belknap Long published gothics under the name of his wife, Lyda Belknap Long. Another example is that of the British writer Peter O'Donnell, who wrote under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent. Outside of publishers such as Love Spell, which ceased publishing in 2010, very few books appear to be published using the term today. With the exception of the American author and poet M.P. Conn (Maria Pilar Conn), who writes gothic fiction in Spanish with her novels La Casa del Marqués and La Canción del Baladre.

Development of the Gothic novel

It cannot be said that the horror novel existed until the appearance of gothic terror; Strictly speaking, the first Gothic novel was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the last Melmoth the Wanderer (1815), by Charles Maturin.^{[citation needed]} Among these authors, the genre developed with works such as Vathek, by William Beckford (1742, originally in French); The Mysteries of Udolfo, by Ann Radcliffe (1794); The Adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin (London, 1794); The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (1796), and Manuscript Found in Zaragoza, by Jan Potocki (1805).

Within the narrative subgenre called novel, it must be distinguished from the fantastic popular narration of folklore and traditional tales of apparitions, because it has been developed fundamentally since the end of the century XVIII to the present and has different characteristics associated with the aesthetic movement known as Romanticism. In some literature manuals, the Gothic novel is also referred to as a crime novel, although this term can currently give rise to misunderstandings.

The characteristics of this genre go through a romantic setting in the first place: gloomy landscapes, gloomy forests, medieval ruins and castles with their respective basements, crypts and passageways well populated with ghosts, nocturnal noises, chains, skeletons, demons... Fascinating characters, strange and unusual, great dangers and often candid girls in trouble; supernatural elements could appear directly or only be suggested. These locations and characters, in time and space, responded to the demand for exotic themes characteristic of the tendency towards medievalism, exoticism and orientalism typical of romantic sensibility.

Although there was no defined movement as in other parts of Europe, various Russian writers also ventured into the genre, contributing stories that exhibit witches, werewolves and other dark characters, typical of Slavic folklore as their main theme. The first, and most prolific, author to dedicate his pen to horror stories is Gogol, with some short stories such as Viy (which has more than one film adaptation), La noche de San Juan, and La noche de mayo o la ahogada. Other Russian authors who introduced horror stories were Baratynski (The Ring), Somov (The Wolf Man), Karamzin (Bornholm Island) and Lermontov (Stuss).

Characteristics of the Gothic novel

According to the essayist César Fuentes Rodríguez, among the specific characteristics of the Gothic novel are the following:

• The intrigue develops in an old castle or a monastery (importance of the architectural setting, which serves to enrich the plot).

• Atmosphere of mystery and suspense (the author creates a supernatural framework or scenario capable, often by himself, of stirring feelings of mystery or terror).

• Ancient prophecy (a curse weighs on the property or on its inhabitants, present or remote).

• Supernatural events or difficult to explain.

• Unchecked emotions (the characters are subject to unbridled passions, panic access, mood agitations such as deep depression, anguish, paranoia, jealousy and sick love).

• Laundered eroticism (under the atmosphere of mystery they lay unresolved loving conflicts and dark sentimental impulses. The damsel's paradigm in trouble is very common; female characters face situations that cause fainting, screaming, crying, and nerve attacks. It appeals to the reader's sense of compassion by presenting a heroine oppressed by anguish terrors that normally becomes the focus of the plot. Another unsuspecting paradigm is that of the tyrannical masculine figure; it is usually a father, king, husband or guardian who requires the maiden an indignant or inadmissible action, whether forced marriage, the sacrifice of her chastity or even more sinister action.

• Pathetic fallacy (the emotions of the protagonists intervene in the appearance of things, or the climate surrounding a scene defines the mood of the characters).

Modern horror

Modern horror is the stage of horror literature that develops from the first half of the XIX century by the work of precursors, such as the American Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and the Irishman Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), whose contributions, especially the so-called psychological terror, represented a profound transformation of previous Gothic horror literature, with strictly romantic roots, and which, as has been seen, used "scare" and other techniques that today could pass for old-fashioned and rudimentary.

History

Already at the end of the XIX century, the tale of horror or ghosts would once again experience a great advance as a result of the contributions from the great growers who found this modality in England (some would be of another nationality, like the French Guy de Maupassant), in the Victorian and Edwardian times. Authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, M. R. James, Henry James, Saki (Héctor Hugh Munro) and Arthur Machen, among others, carried out a profound renewal of styles, themes and contents that, already in the middle of the century XX, would end up leading to the last major author of the genre: the American Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). With him, the macabre genre would once again experience a 180-degree turn.

This author, whose main referent, according to himself, was his compatriot Poe, was the creator of the so-called "materialist tale of terror" (as opposed to the "spiritualism" at all costs typical of the traditional ghost story). He also introduced into the genre elements and contents typical of the nascent science fiction, which would have broad repercussions in all subsequent literature and cinema. Lovecraft, oriented in principle from the captivating fantasies provided by his own dream world, knew how to reconcile these with the teachings of authors of his predilection such as the aforementioned Poe, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, which resulted in the amazing invention of a new pagan mythology in the middle of the XX century, the Cthulhu Mythos, through which he managed to give full expression to the many terrors and obsessions that nested in his sick personality. However, from a stylistic point of view, Lovecraft has sometimes been accused of a restricted style, abundant in adjectives and repetitive formulas, which means that his arguments can be easily predicted as the reader assimilates the author's technique.

It is necessary to mention at this point the group of authors who accompanied Lovecraft on his amazing literary journey, publishing stories in the famous American magazine Weird Tales, some belonging to the Lovecraft Circle and others independent: Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Seabury Quinn, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Donald Wandrei, etc., some of whom, judging by the opinion of certain critics, have questionable literary values.

Another author of interest in this field, not as well known as the film versions of his works, is Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho, one of the last texts to be added to the canon of horror literature. Other outstanding novels by him are Cría cuervos and Arsonists . The Lovecraftians Fritz Leiber and Henry Kuttner wrote mostly fantasy and science fiction novels. The greatest contribution of August Derleth, a direct disciple of Lovecraft, has been the edition of the same texts, although he is the author of some merit stories. Robert E. Howard focused his attention more on epic fantasy: Conan and Sonya the Red, among other famous characters, particularly from film and comic book versions.

One of Lovecraft's models is the English author, already mentioned, William Hope Hodgson, who is considered a precursor of the cosmic horror genre created by him. Born in 1875 and died in 1918, his work The House at the End of the Earth narrates in the first person the adventures of the inhabitant of a small Irish village who is abducted by beings half men, half beasts, and transported to another dimension.

But the writer that a large part of the critics places next to Poe, Lovecraft and Maupassant in the pantheon of illustrious cultivators of fear, is the American Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), who through forceful watermarks such as & #34;A Sacred Terror", "The Blinded Window" or "The cursed thing" He proved himself to be an absolute master in recreating tense, unsettling atmospheres in the midst of which an absorbing and ferocious horror suddenly erupts.

The topic of the werewolf was introduced into the genre by Guy Endore, with his novel "The Wolf Man in Paris", from 1933, although there are clear antecedents in Captain of Wolves from Alexandre Dumas father.

The latest batch of the horror genre includes controversial literary figures, most of them from the Anglo-Saxon world, such as Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker, authors of a large number of best-sellers, some of which have been adapted with success to the cinema In recent years, the production of this genre has moved, to a large extent, from the field of literature to that of cinematography, comics, television and video games, giving rise to a new subgenre of horror, the gore ('thick blood', 'clot' in English), characterized by the easy resort to bloody scenes and cheap offal.

Stephen King is highly controversial due to the enormous diffusion it has achieved, but among the enormous amount of texts it has produced, the most literary ones, such as Dance of Macabre, Salem& #39;s Lot or Different Seasons, of the decidedly commercial ones, and with equally great repercussions, such as The Wolf Man Cycle. Clive Barker's texts sometimes border on the most shameless gore. They are of great interest due to the high flights of imagination in which they display their Books of Blood, with stories of experimental horror, such as "Cabal" or "En las colinas, las ciudades", and others that have been widely distributed due to their film versions, such as Hellraiser, adapted for film.

Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Brian Lumley, and Anne Rice are equally worthy authors in this section. Anne Rice (pseudonym of Howard Allen Frances O'Brien), is famous for the novel Interview with the Vampire, and for its film version, as well as other works such as Vampire Chronicles and Bruges. They are continuations of the first Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, of which there is also a film version, as well as The Body Snatcher. The author has recently reconciled both series in several novels.

Gothic works

• The Castle of Otranto (1764), Horace Walpole.
• The Old English Baron / The Old English Baron (1778) by Clara Reeve.
• The Recess (1785), by Sophia Lee.
• Vathek (1786) by William Beckford.
• Das Petermännchen Christian Heinrich Spiess
• The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794), Ann Radcliffe.
• The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), by William Godwin
• The Children of the Abbey / Children of the Abbey (1796), by Regina Maria Roche
• The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis.
• The Italian, or the confessional of the black penitents (1796-1797), Ann Radcliffe.
• The Mendiga of Locarno (1797), by Heinrich von Kleist
• Der blond Eckbert (1797), by Ludwig Tieck
• Clermont (1798), Regina Maria Roche.
• Wieland or transformation (1798), Charles Brocken.
• St. León (1799) by William Godwin.
• The Miraculous Story of Peter Schlemihl / The Man Who Lost His Shadow (1814) by Adelbert von Chamisso
• Manuscript found in Zaragoza (1805-1815), Jan Potocki.
• The Elixires of the Devil (1815-1816) (Die elixiere das TeufelsE.T.A. Hoffmann.
• The Majority (1817) by E. T. A. Hoffmann.
• Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus (1818) Mary Shelley.
• Das Marmorbild / The marble image (1818) by Joseph von Eichendorff.
• Major Dieatsherren / The Masters (1819), by Achim von Arnim.
• The vampire (1819), by John William Polidori
• Melmoth the errabundo (1820), by Charles Robert Maturin
• Vampire (1821), by E. T. A. Hoffmann
• Infernaliana (1822), Charles Nodier
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner / The private memories and confessions of a justified sinner (1824), by James Hogg
• Our Lady of Paris (1831), by Victor Hugo
• The Fall of Usher House (1839), by Edgar Allan Poe
• Varney the vampire, or the blood feast (1845-1847), James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Preskett.
• Borrascosa Summits (1847), by Emily Brontë
• The house of the seven roofs (1851), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The marble faun (1860) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Mount of the Anniversaries (1861), by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
• Carmilla (1872), by J. S. Le Fanu.
• The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1880), by R. L. Stevenson
• The Ghost of Canterville (1887), by Oscar Wilde
• The portrait of Dorian Gray (1890), by Oscar Wilde
• The Castle of the Carpathians (1892), by Julio Verne
• Another twist (1897), by Henry James
• Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker
• The beast in the cave (1905), by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
• The ghost of the opera (1910), by Gastón Leroux
• The white worm's lair (1911), by Bram Stoker
• The tower of the seven humpbacks (1920), by Emilio Carre. Taken to the cinema by Edgar Neville in 1944
• The white shadow of Casarás (1931), of Jesus of Aragon