The Gothic novel was a peculiar and typically feminine genre of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Peculiar in many respects since Horace Walpole claimed his story — ‘The Castle of Otranto’, the very first specimen of a long-lasting tradition — to be a blend of the ancient romance and the modern novel, the sentimental and the realistic tradition.
Tales of Terror from the House of Blackwood
Although any horror story might be designated a ‘Tale of Terror,’ this term has come to have a particular association with the short sharp shockers of Regency and early-Victorian monthly magazines — particularly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine — a form most perfectly realised in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Aspects of Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian Literature
It is easy to agree with Tzvetan Todorov that fantastic fiction creates a certain “hesitation” in the minds of the intrafictional characters and the extrafictional readers. But it is not as evident that Todorov is right when he claims that what distinguishes the uncanny or gothic from the fantastic is whether the supernatural is explained or not (Todorov 1995:25).
On the Dialectics of Vampirism, Capital, and Time
The vampire is at once an ancient figure and our perfect contemporary. A literary critic could demonstrate this by pointing out that the narrative structure of Bram Stoker’s (1897/1998) ‘Dracula’ plays out in an eternal present, in which everything takes place in the here, and now.
Lovecraftian Monstrosity, Cosmic Horror and the Gothic
Throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries much of mediated western storytelling could be said to reflect the stages, archetypes and themes found within the hero’s journey — or monomyth — outlined in mythologist Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ (2008).
Monstrous Adaptations in Contemporary Gothic Culture
It has been nearly two hundred years since the publication of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel ‘Frankenstein’, and since the birth of her infamous monster (described by Victor Frankenstein in the epigraph above).
Weird Tales and Horror in the Sherlockian Canon
We are all familiar with these words from ‘The Devil’s Foot,’ words that as easily could have been written by H. P. Lovecraft as by John H. Watson.
