Hyde’ (1886), Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1891), and Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898). The final two decades of the nineteenth-century featured a slew of novels containing elements of the Gothic which were perceived to be allied to the fin de siecle decadence, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Dr. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 publication ‘The Coming Race’ was among the first of the Victorian Gothic novels, followed shortly after by Sheridan Le Fanu’s notorious ‘Carmilla’ in 1872. But Gothicism never disappeared from the literary consciousness, which prompts the literary scholar to consider why a revival of the Gothic genre occurred in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century.Īlthough the mid-century works of authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the Bronte sisters borrow isolated elements of its tradition, the full-blown revival of the Gothic novel did not occur until the 1870s. The excesses and sensation of the Gothic seemed to have been put to rest. However, the rise of the realist novel dispensed with its romance and promoted a carefully constructed realism, optimised for social instruction. Its themes and preoccupations permeated every corner of literate England.

The resulting Gothic Literature, typified by the eerie and suggestive supernatural, experienced its heyday from 1764 to 1816. The formerly pejorative term’s application to the post-medieval architecture characterised by the pointed arch and flying buttress was initially intended to comment on its stylistic barbarity rather than its creative source, but nonetheless, the British revival of its castles and cathedrals in the seventeenth-century served as a source of inspiration for authors such as Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Anne Radcliffe. The term itself has come to be associated with dark nights, eerie winds, deserted castles, and romantic horrors, but once upon a time it signified membership in an Eastern Germanic tribe of medieval Europe, a large portion of which originated in Scandinavia.

According to Janles Hogg’s ‘Romantic Reassessment of the Gothic Novel’ (1986), there are three essential components of the Gothic aesthetic: horror, suspense and shock (Hogg 4).

Gothic literature books