Gothic
Back to people overviewThe Gothic emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, at a moment when modernity, Enlightenment rationalism, and industrial change sharpened fascination with the medieval past. Early Gothic fiction reimagined that past as a perilous realm of ruined castles, superstition, imprisonment, hereditary secrets, and sinister threat. Novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) were wildly popular, and the mode has remained
adaptable ever since, reshaping itself around the neuroses and anxieties of successive ages.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) remains one of its most iconic and durable expressions.
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