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It is important to remember that "Gothic" connoted architecture long before it connoted literature. Horace Walpole (1717–1797) was the first to establish a link between the two. In the 1740s he purchased Strawberry Hill, an estate on the Thames near London, and set about remodeling it in what he called "Gothick" style, adding towers, turrets, battlements, arched doors, windows, and ornaments of every description. This obsession was to be the inspiration for The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the book's subtitle, "A Gothic Story," marks the first time that the term was used in a literary context. The sudden flourishing of the Gothic novel at the end of the eighteenth century has been linked by critics to such cultural preoccupations as the French Revolution and concerns about the place of the individual - in relation to both the family and society at large - in a rapidly changing social order. The spectre of social revolution is manifest in the supernatural "spectres" of the Gothic: a crumbling way of life emerges as a crumbling and haunted Gothic manor; the loss of English social identity becomes the Gothic hero or heroine's search for identity. The gothic type of novel flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England. These were romances were centered on belief and the suspension of disbelief and were mysterious, frequently including the supernatural and creating an uneasy atmosphere, or even horror. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was the predecessor of the type. The works of Ann Radcliffe , Matthew Gregory Lewis , and Charles R. Maturin , and the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley are also referred to this movement . - Mystery & Suspense - Secrets & Scandals - Murder - Persecuted maiden, forced apart from true love - Ineffectual Hero (not having the ability, confidence, or personal authority to get things done) - Brooding Villain - Supernatural - Surprise Revelations - Entrapment - Coincidences - The Unspeakable (extreme feeling (of terror, for example) that cannot be put into words) - Debate between Reason and Emotion - Pleasing Fear - Allegory and Symbols - Peculiar Setting
Ann Radcliffe in her essay entitled "On the Supernatural in Poetry" (1826) argues that terror is characterized by obscure treatment of potentially horrible events; it is this obscurity that leads the reader toward the sublime. Horror, in contrast, "nearly annihilates" the reader's perception with its unambiguous displays of brutality.
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