Gothic architecture thrived during the high and late medieval period. The upper echelons of the feudal system were so impressed by the looming cathedrals that they had their castles built in the same Gothic style. These castles are striking yet,...

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia both make excellent examples of the roles of women in the eighteenth century, including what those roles were supposed to be and what they...

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was the first gothic novel, and thus was the originator of many of the distinctive features that have pertained throughout the history of the genre. Early gothic was characterized by the rejection of enlightenment...

When Horace Walpole wrote the first ever Gothic novel in 1764, the world had never seen anything quite like it before. In an age we now call the enlightenment, where knowledge, science and philosophy had made huge leaps forward, this book dared to...

From the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century, known as the Romantic period, there existed a shift in some cultural and artistic elements that leaned towards a revival of the Gothic. As well as a revival of the Gothic through...

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is hailed as the first novel of the Gothic genre. Accordingly, the novel contains many tropes found in gothic literature, such as the pious princess and the evil prince. In the novel, male characters do...

The most appealing aspect of the Gothic genre is its ability to scare the reader, without actually having a physical or harmful affect on her. However, in order to inflict terror upon the reader, the author must create realistic settings,...