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Gothic fiction

Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror (primarily in the 20th century), is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.

The first work to call itself Gothic was Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, later subtitled "A Gothic Story". Subsequent 18th-century contributors included Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, and Matthew Lewis. The Gothic influence continued into the early 19th century; works by the Romantic poets, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, and novelists such as Mary Shelley, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott and E. T. A. Hoffmann frequently drew upon gothic motifs in their works.

The early Victorian period continued the use of gothic aesthetic in novels by Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters, as well as works by the American writers Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Later well-known works were Dracula by Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh's The Beetle and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Twentieth-century contributors include Daphne du Maurier, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison.

Characteristics
Gothic fiction is characterized by an environment of fear, the threat of supernatural events, and the intrusion of the past upon the present. The setting typically includes physical reminders of the past, especially through ruined buildings which stand as proof of a previously thriving world which is decaying in the present. Characteristic settings in the 18th and 19th centuries include castles, religious buildings such as monasteries and convents, and crypts. The atmosphere is typically claustrophobic, and common plot elements include vengeful persecution, imprisonment, and murder. The depiction of horrible events in Gothic fiction often serves as a metaphorical expression of psychological or social conflicts. The form of a Gothic story is usually discontinuous and convoluted, often incorporating tales within tales, changing narrators, and framing devices such as discovered manuscripts or interpolated histories. Other characteristics, regardless of relevance to the main plot, can include sleeplike and deathlike states, live burials, doubles, unnatural echoes or silences, the discovery of obscured family ties, unintelligible writings, nocturnal landscapes, remote locations, and dreams. Especially in the late 19th century, Gothic fiction often involved demons and demonic possession, ghosts, and other kinds of evil spirits.

Gothic fiction often moves between "high culture" and "low" or "popular culture".

Role of architecture
Gothic literature is strongly associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, marked by harsh laws enforced by torture and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. Similar to the Gothic Revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the Neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. Gothic ruins invoke multiple linked emotions by representing inevitable decay and the collapse of human creations – hence the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks.

Placing a story in a Gothic building serves several purposes. It inspires feelings of awe, implies that the story is set in the past, gives an impression of isolation or dissociation from the rest of the world, and conveys religious associations. Setting the novel in a Gothic castle was meant to imply a story set in the past and shrouded in darkness. The architecture often served as a mirror for the characters and events of the story. The buildings in The Castle of Otranto, for example, are riddled with tunnels that characters use to move back and forth in secret. This movement mirrors the secrets surrounding Manfred's possession of the castle and how it came into his family.

The Female Gothic
From the castles, dungeons, forests, and hidden passages of the Gothic novel genre emerged female Gothic. Guided by the works of authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Brontë, the female Gothic allowed women's societal and sexual desires to be introduced. In many respects, the novel's intended reader of the time was the woman who, even as she enjoyed such novels, felt she had to "[lay] down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame," according to Jane Austen. The Gothic novel shaped its form for woman readers to "turn to Gothic romances to find support for their own mixed feelings."

Female Gothic narratives focus on such topics as a persecuted heroine fleeing from a villainous father and searching for an absent mother. At the same time, male writers tend towards the masculine transgression of social taboos. The emergence of the ghost story gave women writers something to write about besides the common marriage plot, allowing them to present a more radical critique of male power, violence, and predatory sexuality. Authors such as Mary Robinson and Charlotte Dacre however, present a counter to the naive and persecuted heroines usually featured in female Gothic of the time, and instead feature more sexually assertive heroines in their works.

When the female Gothic coincides with the explained supernatural the natural cause of terror is not the supernatural, but female disability and societal horrors: rape, incest, and the threatening control of a male antagonist. Female Gothic novels also address women's discontent with patriarchal society, their difficult and unsatisfying maternal position, and their role within that society. Women's fears of entrapment in the domestic, their bodies, marriage, childbirth, or domestic abuse commonly appear in the genre.

After the characteristic Gothic Bildungsroman-like plot sequence, female Gothic allowed readers to grow from "adolescence to maturity" in the face of the realized impossibilities of the supernatural. As protagonists such as Adeline in The Romance of the Forest learn that their superstitious fantasies and terrors are replaced by natural cause and reasonable doubt, the reader may grasp the heroine's true position: "The heroine possesses the romantic temperament that perceives strangeness where others see none. Her sensibility, therefore, prevents her from knowing that her true plight is her condition, the disability of being female."

Precursors
The components that would eventually combine into Gothic literature had a rich history by the time Walpole presented a fictitious medieval manuscript in The Castle of Otranto in 1764.

The plays of William Shakespeare, in particular, were a crucial reference point for early Gothic writers, in both an effort to bring credibility to their works, and to legitimize the emerging genre as serious literature to the public. Tragedies such as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III, with plots revolving around the supernatural, revenge, murder, ghosts, witchcraft, and omens, written in dramatic pathos, and set in medieval castles, were a huge influence upon early Gothic authors, who frequently quote, and make allusions to Shakespeare's works.

John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) was also very influential among Gothic writers, who were especially drawn to the tragic anti-hero character Satan, who became a model for many charismatic Gothic villains and Byronic heroes. Milton's "version of the myth of the fall and redemption, creation and decreation, is, as Frankenstein again reveals, an important model for Gothic plots."

Alexander Pope, who had a considerable influence on Walpole, was the first significant poet of the 18th century to write a poem in an authentic Gothic manner. Eloisa to Abelard (1717), a tale of star-crossed lovers, one doomed to a life of seclusion in a convent, and the other in a monastery, abounds in gloomy imagery, religious terror, and suppressed passion. The influence of Pope's poem is found throughout 18th-century Gothic literature, including the novels of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis.

Gothic literature is often described with words such as "wonder" and "terror." This sense of wonder and terror that provides the suspension of disbelief so important to the Gothic—which, except for when it is parodied, even for all its occasional melodrama, is typically played straight, in a self-serious manner—requires the imagination of the reader to be willing to accept the idea that there might be something "beyond that which is immediately in front of us." The mysterious imagination necessary for Gothic literature to have gained any traction had been growing for some time before the advent of the Gothic. The need for this came as the known world was becoming more explored, reducing the geographical mysteries of the world. The edges of the map were filling in, and no dragons were to be found. The human mind required a replacement. Clive Bloom theorizes that this void in the collective imagination was critical in developing the cultural possibility for the rise of the Gothic tradition.

The setting of most early Gothic works was medieval, but this was a common theme long before Walpole. In Britain especially, there was a desire to reclaim a shared past. This obsession frequently led to extravagant architectural displays, such as Fonthill Abbey, and sometimes mock tournaments were held. It was not merely in literature that a medieval revival made itself felt, and this, too, contributed to a culture ready to accept a perceived medieval work in 1764.

The Gothic often uses scenery of decay, death, and morbidity to achieve its effects (especially in the Italian Horror school of Gothic). However, Gothic literature was not the origin of this tradition; it was far older. The corpses, skeletons, and churchyards so commonly associated with early Gothic works were popularized by the Graveyard poets. They were also present in novels such as Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, which contains comical scenes of plague carts and piles of corpses. Even earlier, poets like Edmund Spenser evoked a dreary and sorrowful mood in such poems as Epithalamion.

All aspects of pre-Gothic literature occur to some degree in the Gothic, but even taken together, they still fall short of true Gothic. What needed to be added was an aesthetic to tie the elements together. Bloom notes that this aesthetic must take the form of a theoretical or philosophical core, which is necessary to "sav[e] the best tales from becoming mere anecdote or incoherent sensationalism." In this case, the aesthetic needed to be emotional, and was finally provided by Edmund Burke's 1757 work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which "finally codif[ied] the gothic emotional experience." Specifically, Burke's thoughts on the Sublime, Terror, and Obscurity were most applicable. These sections can be summarized thus: the Sublime is that which is or produces the "strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling"; Terror most often evoked the Sublime; and to cause Terror, we need some amount of Obscurity – we can't know everything about that which is inducing Terror – or else "a great deal of the apprehension vanishes"; Obscurity is necessary to experience the Terror of the unknown. Bloom asserts that Burke's descriptive vocabulary was essential to the Romantic works that eventually informed the Gothic.

The birth of Gothic literature was thought to have been influenced by political upheaval. Researchers linked its birth with the English Civil War, culminating in a Jacobite rebellion (1745) more recent to the first Gothic novel (1764). The collective political memory and any deep cultural fears associated with it likely contributed to early Gothic villains as literary representatives of defeated Tory barons or Royalists "rising" from their political graves in the pages of early Gothic novels to terrorize the bourgeois reader of late eighteenth-century England.

Eighteenth-century Gothic novels
The first work to call itself "Gothic" was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). The first edition presented the story as a translation of a sixteenth- century manuscript and was widely popular. Walpole, in the second edition, revealed himself as the author which adding the subtitle "A Gothic Story." The revelation prompted a backlash from readers, who considered it inappropriate for a modern author to write a supernatural story in a rational age. Walpole did not initially prompt many imitators. Beginning with Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1778), the 1780s saw more writers attempting his combination of supernatural plots with emotionally realistic characters. Examples include Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783–5) and William Beckford's Vathek (1786).

At the height of the Gothic novel's popularity in the 1790s, the genre was almost synonymous with Ann Radcliffe, whose works were highly anticipated and widely imitated. The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) were particularly popular. In an essay on Radcliffe, Walter Scott, writes of the popularity of Udolpho at the time, "The very name was fascinating, and the public, who rushed upon it with all the eagerness of curiosity, rose from it with unsated appetite. When a family was numerous, the volumes flew, and were sometimes torn from hand to hand." Radcliffe's novels were often seen as the feminine and rational opposite of a more violently horrifying male Gothic associated with Matthew Lewis. Radcliffe's final novel, The Italian (1797), responded to Lewis's The Monk (1796), Radcliffe and Lewis have been called "the two most significant Gothic novelists of the 1790s."

The popularity and influence of The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk saw the rise of shorter and cheaper versions of Gothic literature in the forms of Gothic bluebooks and chapbooks, which in many cases were plagiarized and abridgments of well known Gothic novels. The Monk in particular, with its immoral and sensational content, saw many plagiarized copies, and was notably drawn from in the cheaper pamphlets.

Other notable Gothic novels of the 1790s include William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), Regina Maria Roche's Clermont (1798), and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), as well as large numbers of anonymous works published by the Minerva Press. In continental Europe, Romantic literary movements led to related Gothic genres such as the German Schauerroman and the French Roman noir. Eighteenth-century Gothic novels were typically set in a distant past and (for English novels) a distant European country, but without specific dates or historical figures that characterized the later development of historical fiction.

The saturation of Gothic-inspired literature during the 1790s was referred to in a letter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing on 16 March 1797, "indeed I am almost weary of the Terrible, having been a hireling in the Critical Review for the last six or eight months – I have been reviewing the Monk, the Italian, Hubert de Sevrac &c &c &c – in all of which dungeons, and old castles, & solitary Houses by the Sea Side & Caverns & Woods & extraordinary characters & all the tribe of Horror & Mystery, have crowded on me – even to surfeiting." The excesses, stereotypes, and frequent absurdities of the Gothic genre made it rich territory for satire. Historian Rictor Norton notes that satire of Gothic literature was common from 1796 until the 1820s, including early satirical works such as The New Monk (1798), More Ghosts! (1798) and Rosella, or Modern Occurrences (1799). Gothic novels themselves, according to Norton, also possess elements of self-satire, "By having profane comic characters as well as sacred serious characters, the Gothic novelist could puncture the balloon of the supernatural while at the same time affirming the power of the imagination." After 1800 there was a period in which Gothic parodies outnumbered forthcoming Gothic novels. In The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813), Gothic tropes are exaggerated for comic effect. In Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818), the naive protagonist, a female named Catherine, conceives herself as a heroine of a Radcliffean romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side. However, the truth turns out to be much more prosaic. This novel is also noted for including a list of early Gothic works known as the Northanger Horrid Novels.

Second generation or Jüngere Romantik
The poetry, romantic adventures, and character of Lord Byron—characterized by his spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad and dangerous to know"—were another inspiration for the Gothic novel, providing the archetype of the Byronic hero. For example, Byron is the title character in Lady Caroline's Gothic novel Glenarvon (1816).

Byron was also the host of the celebrated ghost-story competition involving himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. This occasion was productive of both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), featuring the Byronic Lord Ruthven. The Vampyre has been accounted by cultural critic Christopher Frayling as one of the most influential works of fiction ever written and spawned a craze for vampire fiction and theatre (and, latterly, film) that has not ceased to this day. Although clearly influenced by the Gothic tradition, Mary Shelley's novel is often considered the first science fiction novel, despite the novel's lack of any scientific explanation for the monster's animation and the focus instead on the moral dilemmas and consequences of such a creation.

John Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) and Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1820) feature mysteriously fey ladies. In the latter poem, the names of the characters, the dream visions, and the macabre physical details are influenced by the novels of premiere Gothicist Ann Radcliffe.

Although ushering in the historical novel, and turning popularity away from Gothic fiction, Walter Scott frequently employed Gothic elements in his novels and poetry. Scott drew upon oral folklore, fireside tales, and ancient superstitions, often juxtaposing rationality and the supernatural. Novels such as The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), in which the characters' fates are decided by superstition and prophecy, or the poem Marmion (1808), in which a nun is walled alive inside a convent, illustrate Scott's influence and use of Gothic themes.

A late example of a traditional Gothic novel is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin, which combines themes of anti-Catholicism with an outcast Byronic hero. Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy! (1827) features standard Gothic motifs, characters, and plot, but with one significant twist; it is set in the twenty-second century and speculates on fantastic scientific developments that might have occurred three hundred years in the future, making it and Frankenstein among the earliest examples of the science fiction genre developing from Gothic traditions.

During two decades, the most famous author of Gothic literature in Germany was the polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann. Lewis's The Monk influenced and even mentioned it in his novel The Devil's Elixirs (1815). The novel explores the motive of Doppelgänger, a term coined by another German author and supporter of Hoffmann, Jean-Paul, in his humorous novel Siebenkäs (1796–1797). He also wrote an opera based on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Gothic story Undine (1816), for which de la Motte Fouqué wrote the libretto. Aside from Hoffmann and de la Motte Fouqué, three other important authors from the era were Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (The Marble Statue, 1818), Ludwig Achim von Arnim (Die Majoratsherren, 1819), and Adelbert von Chamisso (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 1814). After them, Wilhelm Meinhold wrote The Amber Witch (1838) and Sidonia von Bork (1847).

In Spain, the priest Pascual Pérez Rodríguez was the most diligent novelist in the Gothic way, closely aligned to the supernatural explained by Ann Radcliffe. At the same time, the poet José de Espronceda published The Student of Salamanca (1837–1840), a narrative poem that presents a horrid variation on the Don Juan legend.

In Russia, authors of the Romantic era include Antony Pogorelsky (penname of Alexey Alexeyevich Perovsky), Orest Somov, Oleksa Storozhenko, Alexandr Pushkin, Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoy, Mikhail Lermontov (for his work Stuss), and Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. Pushkin is particularly important, as his 1833 short story The Queen of Spades was so popular that it was adapted into operas and later films by Russian and foreign artists. Some parts of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) are also considered to belong to the Gothic genre, but they lack the supernatural elements of other Russian Gothic stories.

The following poems are also now considered to belong to the Gothic genre: Meshchevskiy's "Lila", Katenin's "Olga", Pushkin's "The Bridegroom", Pletnev's "The Gravedigger" and Lermontov's Demon (1829–1839).

The key author of the transition from Romanticism to Realism, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, who was also one of the most important authors of Romanticism, produced a number of works that qualify as Gothic fiction. Each of his three short story collections features a number of stories that fall within the Gothic genre or contain Gothic elements. They include "Saint John's Eve" and "A Terrible Vengeance" from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–1832), "The Portrait" from Arabesques (1835), and "Viy" from Mirgorod (1835). While all are well known, the latter is probably the most famous, having inspired at least eight film adaptations (two now considered lost), one animated film, two documentaries, and a video game. Gogol's work differs from Western European Gothic fiction, as his cultural influences drew on Ukrainian folklore, the Cossack lifestyle, and, as a religious man, Orthodox Christianity.

Other relevant authors of this era include Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky (The Living Corpse, written 1838, published 1844, The Ghost, The Sylphide, as well as short stories), Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (The Family of the Vourdalak, 1839, and The Vampire, 1841), Mikhail Zagoskin (Unexpected Guests), Józef Sękowski/Osip Senkovsky (Antar), and Yevgeny Baratynsky (The Ring).

Nineteenth-century Gothic fiction
By the Victorian era, Gothic had ceased to be the dominant genre for novels in England, partly replaced by more sedate historical fiction. However, Gothic short stories continued to be popular, published in magazines or as small chapbooks called penny dreadfuls. The most influential Gothic writer from this period was the American Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote numerous short stories and poems reinterpreting Gothic tropes. His story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) revisits classic Gothic tropes of aristocratic decay, death, and madness. Poe is now considered the master of the American Gothic. In England, one of the most influential penny dreadfuls is the anonymously authored Varney the Vampire (1847), which introduced the trope of vampires having sharpened teeth. Another notable English author of penny dreadfuls is George W. M. Reynolds, known for The Mysteries of London (1844), Faust (1846), Wagner the Wehr-wolf (1847), and The Necromancer (1857). Elizabeth Gaskell's tales "The Doom of the Griffiths" (1858), "Lois the Witch", and "The Grey Woman" all employ one of the most common themes of Gothic fiction: the power of ancestral sins to curse future generations, or the fear that they will. M. R. James, an English medievalist whose stories are still popular today, is known as the originator of the "antiquarian ghost story." In Spain, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer stood out with his romantic poems and short tales, some depicting supernatural events. Today some consider him the most-read Spanish writer after Miguel de Cervantes.

In addition to these short Gothic fictions, some novels drew on the Gothic. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) transports the Gothic to the forbidding Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a Byronic hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff. The Brontës' fictions were cited by feminist critic Ellen Moers as prime examples of Female Gothic, exploring woman's entrapment within domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. Emily Brontë's Cathy and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre are examples of female protagonists in such roles. Louisa May Alcott's Gothic potboiler, A Long Fatal Love Chase (written in 1866 but published in 1995), is also an interesting specimen of this subgenre. Charlotte Brontë's Villette also shows the Gothic influence, with its supernatural subplot featuring a ghostly nun, and its view of Roman Catholicism as exotic and heathenistic. Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables, about a family's ancestral home, is colored with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft; and in true Gothic fashion, it features the house itself as one of the main characters,

The genre also heavily influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, who read Gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting; for example, in Oliver Twist (1837–1838), Bleak House (1854) and Great Expectations (1860–1861). These works juxtapose wealthy, ordered, and affluent civilization with the disorder and barbarity of the poor in the same metropolis. Bleak House, in particular, is credited with introducing urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film (Mighall 2007). Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, is one of Dickens’ most Gothic characters. The bitter recluse who shuts herself away in her gloomy mansion ever since being jilted at the altar on her wedding day. His most explicitly Gothic work is his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he did not live to complete and was published unfinished upon his death in 1870. The mood and themes of the Gothic novel held a particular fascination for the Victorians, with their obsession with mourning rituals, mementos, and mortality in general.

Irish Catholics also wrote Gothic fiction in the 19th century. Although some Anglo-Irish dominated and defined the subgenre decades later, they did not own it. Irish Catholic Gothic writers included Gerald Griffin, James Clarence Mangan, and John and Michael Banim. William Carleton was a notable Gothic writer, and converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism.

In Switzerland, Jeremias Gotthelf wrote The Black Spider (1842), an allegorical work that uses Gothic themes. The last work from the German writer Theodor Storm, The Rider on the White Horse (1888), also uses Gothic motives and themes.

After Gogol, Russian literature saw the rise of Realism, but many authors continued to write stories within Gothic fiction territory. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, one of the most celebrated Realists, wrote Faust (1856), Phantoms (1864), Song of the Triumphant Love (1881), and Clara Milich (1883). Another classic Russian Realist, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, incorporated Gothic elements into many of his works, although none can be seen as purely Gothic. Grigory Petrovich Danilevsky, who wrote historical and early science fiction novels and stories, wrote Mertvec-ubiytsa (Dead Murderer) in 1879. Also, Grigori Alexandrovich Machtet wrote "Zaklyatiy kazak", which may now also be considered Gothic.

The 1880s saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form allied to fin de siecle, which fictionalized contemporary fears like ethical degeneration and questioned the social structures of the time. Classic works of this Urban Gothic include Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), and the stories of Arthur Machen.

In Ireland, Gothic fiction tended to be purveyed by the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy. According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker form the core of the Irish Gothic subgenre with stories featuring castles set in a barren landscape and a cast of remote aristocrats dominating an atavistic peasantry, which represent an allegorical form the political plight of Catholic Ireland subjected to the Protestant Ascendancy. Le Fanu's use of the gloomy villain, forbidding mansion, and persecuted heroine in Uncle Silas (1864) shows direct influence from Walpole's Otranto and Radcliffe's Udolpho. Le Fanu's short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) includes the superlative vampire tale Carmilla, which provided fresh blood for that particular strand of the Gothic and influenced Bram Stoker's vampire novel Dracula (1897). Stoker's book created the most famous Gothic villain ever, Count Dracula, and established Transylvania and Eastern Europe as the locus classicus of the Gothic. Published in the same year as Dracula, Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire is another piece of vampire fiction. The Blood of the Vampire, which, like Carmilla, features a female vampire, is notable for its treatment of vampirism as both racial and medicalized. The vampire, Harriet Brandt, is also a psychic vampire, killing unintentionally.

In the United States, notable late 19th-century writers in the Gothic tradition were Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and Edith Wharton. Bierce's short stories were in the horrific and pessimistic tradition of Poe. Chambers indulged in the decadent style of Wilde and Machen, even including a character named Wilde in his The King in Yellow (1895). Wharton published some notable Gothic ghost stories. Some works of the Canadian writer Gilbert Parker also fall into the genre, including the stories in The Lane that had No Turning (1900).

The serialized novel The Phantom of the Opera (1909–1910) by the French writer Gaston Leroux is another well-known example of Gothic fiction from the early 20th century, when many German authors were writing works influenced by Schauerroman, including Hanns Heinz Ewers.

Russian Gothic
Until the 1990s, Russian Gothic critics did not view Russian Gothic as a genre or label. If used, the word "gothic" was used to describe (mostly early) works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky from the 1880s. Most critics used tags such as "Romanticism" and "fantastique", such as in the 1984 story collection translated into English as Russian 19th-Century Gothic Tales but originally titled Фантастический мир русской романтической повести, literally, "The Fantastic World of Russian Romanticism Short Story/Novella." However, since the mid-1980s, Russian gothic fiction as a genre began to be discussed in books such as The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760–1960, The Russian Gothic Novel and its British Antecedents and Goticheskiy roman v Rossii (The Gothic Novel in Russia).

The first Russian author whose work has been described as gothic fiction is considered to be Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin. While many of his works feature gothic elements, the first to belong purely under the gothic fiction label is Ostrov Borngolm (Island of Bornholm) from 1793. Nearly ten years later, Nikolay Ivanovich Gnedich followed suit with his 1803 novel Don Corrado de Gerrera, set in Spain during the reign of Philip II. The term "Gothic" is sometimes also used to describe the ballads of Russian authors such as Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, particularly "Ludmila" (1808) and "Svetlana" (1813), both translations based on Gottfreid August Burger's Gothic German ballad, "Lenore".

During the last years of Imperial Russia in the early 20th century, many authors continued to write in the Gothic fiction genre. They include the historian and historical fiction writer Alexander Valentinovich Amfiteatrov and Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev, who developed psychological characterization; the symbolist Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov, Alexander Grin, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov; and Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin. Nobel Prize winner Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin wrote Dry Valley (1912), which is seen as influenced by Gothic literature. In a monograph on the subject, Muireann Maguire writes, "The centrality of the Gothic-fantastic to Russian fiction is almost impossible to exaggerate, and certainly exceptional in the context of world literature."

Twentienth-century Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction and Modernism influenced each other. This is often evident in detective fiction, horror fiction, and science fiction, but the influence of the Gothic can also be seen in the high literary Modernism of the 20th century. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) initiated a re-working of older literary forms and myths that became common in the work of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter, among others. In Joyce's Ulysses (1922), the living are transformed into ghosts, which points to an Ireland in stasis at the time and a history of cyclical trauma from the Great Famine in the 1840s through to the current moment in the text. The way Ulysses uses Gothic tropes such as ghosts and hauntings while removing the supernatural elements of 19th-century Gothic fiction indicates a general form of modernist Gothic writing in the first half of the 20th century.

In America, pulp magazines such as Weird Tales reprinted classic Gothic horror tales from the previous century by authors like Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and printed new stories by modern authors featuring both traditional and new horrors. The most significant of these was H. P. Lovecraft, who also wrote a conspectus of the Gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936), and developed a Mythos that would influence Gothic and contemporary horror well into the 21st century. Lovecraft's protégé, Robert Bloch, contributed to Weird Tales and penned Psycho (1959), which drew on the classic interests of the genre. From these, the Gothic genre per se gave way to modern horror fiction, regarded by some literary critics as a branch of the Gothic, although others use the term to cover the entire genre.

The Romantic strand of Gothic was taken up in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), which is seen by some to have been influenced by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Other books by du Maurier, such as Jamaica Inn (1936), also display Gothic tendencies. Du Maurier's work inspired a substantial body of "female Gothics," concerning heroines alternately swooning over or terrified by scowling Byronic men in possession of acres of prime real estate and the appertaining droit du seigneur.

Southern Gothic
The genre also influenced American writing, creating a Southern Gothic genre that combines some Gothic sensibilities, such as the grotesque, with the setting and style of the Southern United States. Examples include Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, John Kennedy Toole, Manly Wade Wellman, Eudora Welty, V. C. Andrews, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, Davis Grubb, Anne Rice, Harper Lee, and Cormac McCarthy.

New Gothic romances
Mass-produced Gothic romances became popular in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with authors such as Phyllis A. Whitney, Joan Aiken, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, Mary Stewart, Alicen White, and Jill Tattersall. Many featured covers show a terror-stricken woman in diaphanous attire in front of a gloomy castle, often with a single-lit window. Many were published under the Paperback Library Gothic imprint and marketed to female readers. While the authors were mostly women, some men wrote Gothic romances under female pseudonyms: the prolific Clarissa Ross and Marilyn Ross were pseudonyms of the male Dan Ross; Frank Belknap Long published Gothics under his wife's name, Lyda Belknap Long; the British writer Peter O'Donnell wrote under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent. After the gothic romance boom faded away in the early 1990s, very few publishers embraced the term for mass market romance paperbacks apart from imprints like Love Spell, which was discontinued in 2010. However, in recent years the term "Gothic Romance" is being used to describe both old and new works of Gothic fiction.

Contemporary Gothic
Gothic fiction continues to be extensively practised by contemporary authors.

Many modern writers of horror or other types of fiction exhibit considerable Gothic sensibilities – examples include Anne Rice, Susan Hill, Billy Martin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Carmen Maria Machado, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King. Thomas M. Disch's novel The Priest (1994) was subtitled A Gothic Romance and partly modeled on Matthew Lewis' The Monk. Many writers such as Billy Martin, Stephen King, Brett Easton Ellis, and Clive Barker have focused on the body's surface and blood's visuality. England's Rhiannon Ward is among the recent writers of Gothic fiction. Catriona Ward won a British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel for her gothic novel Rawblood in 2016.

Contemporary American writers in the tradition include Joyce Carol Oates with such novels as Bellefleur and A Bloodsmoor Romance, Toni Morrison with her radical novel Beloved, about a slave-woman whose murdered baby haunts her, Raymond Kennedy with his novel Lulu Incognito, Donna Tartt with her postmodern gothic horror novel The Secret History, Ursula Vernon with her Edgar Allan Poe-inspired novel What Moves the Dead, Danielle Trussoni with her "gothic extravaganza" The Ancestor, and filmmaker Anna Biller with Bluebeard's Castle, a throwback to 18th-century Gothic novels and 1960s dime-store romances. British writers who have continued in the Gothic tradition include Sarah Waters with her haunted house novel The Little Stranger, Diane Setterfield with her quintessentially Gothic novels The Thirteenth Tale and Once Upon a River, Helen Oyeyemi with her experimental novel White is for Witching, Sarah Perry with her novels Melmoth and The Essex Serpent, and Laura Purcell with her historical novels The Silent Companions and The Shape of Darkness.

Several Gothic traditions have also developed in New Zealand (with the subgenre referred to as New Zealand Gothic or Maori Gothic) and Australia (known as Australian Gothic). These explore everything from the multicultural natures of the two countries to their natural geography. Novels in the Australian Gothic tradition include Kate Grenville's The Secret River and the works of Kim Scott. An even smaller genre is Tasmanian Gothic, set exclusively on the island, with prominent examples including Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan and The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson. Another Australian author, Kate Morton, has penned several homages to classic gothic fiction, among them The Distant Hours and The House at Riverton.

Southern Ontario Gothic applies a similar sensibility to a Canadian cultural context. Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Barbara Gowdy, Timothy Findley, and Margaret Atwood have all produced notable exemplars of this form. Another writer in the tradition was Henry Farrell, best known for his 1960 Hollywood horror novel What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Farrell's novels spawned a subgenre of "Grande Dame Guignol" in the cinema, represented by such films as the 1962 film based on Farrell's novel, which starred Bette Davis versus Joan Crawford; this subgenre of films was dubbed the "psycho-biddy" genre.

Outside the English-speaking world, Latin American Gothic literature has been gaining momentum since the first decades of the 21st century. Some of the main authors whose style has been described as Gothic are María Fernanda Ampuero, Mariana Enríquez, Fernanda Melchor, Mónica Ojeda, Giovanna Rivero, Michelle Roche-Rodríguez, and Samanta Schweblin.

The many Gothic subgenres include a new "environmental Gothic" or "ecoGothic". It is an ecologically aware Gothic engaged in "dark nature" and "ecophobia." Writers and critics of the ecoGothic suggest that the Gothic genre is uniquely positioned to speak to anxieties about climate change and the planet's ecological future.

Among the bestselling books of the 21st century, the YA novel Twilight by Stephenie Meyer is now increasingly identified as a Gothic novel, as is Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 2001 novel The Shadow of the Wind.

Other media
Literary Gothic themes have been translated into other media.

There was a notable revival in 20th-century Gothic horror cinema, such as the classic Universal monsters films of the 1930s, Hammer Horror films, and Roger Corman's Poe cycle.

In Hindi cinema, the Gothic tradition was combined with aspects of Indian culture, particularly reincarnation, for an "Indian Gothic" genre, beginning with Mahal (1949) and Madhumati (1958).

The 1960s Gothic television series Dark Shadows borrowed liberally from Gothic traditions, with elements like haunted mansions, vampires, witches, doomed romances, werewolves, obsession, and madness.

The early 1970s saw a Gothic Romance comic book mini-trend with such titles as DC Comics' The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love and The Sinister House of Secret Love, Charlton Comics' Haunted Love, Curtis Magazines' Gothic Tales of Love, and Atlas/Seaboard Comics' one-shot magazine Gothic Romances.

Twentieth-century rock music also had its Gothic side. Black Sabbath's 1970 debut album created a dark sound different from other bands at the time and has been called the first-ever "goth-rock" record.

However, the first recorded use of "gothic" to describe a style of music was for The Doors. Critic John Stickney used the term "gothic rock" to describe the music of The Doors in October 1967 in a review published in The Williams Record. The album recognized as initiating the goth music genre is Unknown Pleasures by the band Joy Division. However, earlier bands such as The Velvet Underground also contributed to the genre's distinctive style. Themes from Gothic writers such as H. P. Lovecraft were used among Gothic rock and heavy metal bands, especially in black metal, thrash metal (Metallica's The Call of Ktulu), death metal, and gothic metal. For example, in his compositions, heavy metal musician King Diamond delights in telling stories full of horror, theatricality, Satanism, and anti-Catholicism.

In role-playing games (RPG), the pioneering 1983 Dungeons & Dragons adventure Ravenloft instructs the players to defeat the vampire Strahd von Zarovich, who pines for his dead lover. It has been acclaimed as one of the best role-playing adventures ever and even inspired an entire fictional world of the same name. The World of Darkness is a gothic-punk RPG line set in the real world, with the added element of supernatural creatures such as werewolves and vampires. In addition to its flagship title Vampire: The Masquerade, the game line features a number of spin-off RPGs such as Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, Hunter: The Reckoning, and Changeling: The Dreaming, allowing for a wide range of characters in the gothic-punk setting. My Life with Master uses Gothic horror conventions as a metaphor for abusive relationships, placing the players in the shoes of minions of a tyrannical, larger-than-life Master.

Various video games feature Gothic horror themes and plots. The Castlevania series typically involves a hero of the Belmont lineage exploring a dark, old castle, fighting vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's Creature, and other Gothic monster staples, culminating in a battle against Dracula himself. Others, such as Ghosts 'n Goblins, feature a camper parody of Gothic fiction. 2017's Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a Southern Gothic reboot to the survival horror video game involves an everyman and his wife trapped in a derelict plantation and mansion owned by a family with sinister and hideous secrets and must face terrifying visions of a ghostly mutant in the shape of a little girl. This was followed by 2021's Resident Evil Village, a Gothic horror sequel focusing on an action hero searching for his kidnapped daughter in a mysterious Eastern European village under the control of a bizarre religious cult inhabited by werewolves, vampires, ghosts, shapeshifters, and other monsters. The Devil May Cry series stands as an equally parodic and self-serious franchise, following the escapades, stunts and mishaps of series protagonist Dante as he explores dingy demonic castles, ancient occult monuments and ruined urban landscapes on his quest to avenge his mother and brother. Gothic literary themes appear all throughout the story, such as how the past physically creeps into the ambiguously modern setting, recurrent imagery of doubles (notably regarding Dante and his twin brother), and the persisting melodramas associated with Dante's father's fame, absence, and demonic heritage. Beginning with Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Female Gothic elements enter the series as deuteragonist Lady works through her own revenge plot against her murderous father, with the oppressive and consistent emotional and physical abuse instigated by a patriarchal figure serving as a heavy, understated counterweight to the extravagance of the rest of the story. Finally, Bloodborne takes place in the decaying Gothic city of Yharnam, where the player must face werewolves, shambling mutants, vampires, witches, and numerous other Gothic staple creatures. However, the game takes a marked turn midway shifting from gothic to Lovecraftian horror.

Popular tabletop card game Magic: The Gathering, known for its parallel universe consisting of "planes," features the plane known as Innistrad. Its general aesthetic is based on northeast European Gothic horror. Innistard's common residents include cultists, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

Modern Gothic horror films include Sleepy Hollow, Interview with the Vampire, Underworld, The Wolfman, From Hell, Dorian Gray, Let the Right One In, The Woman in Black, Crimson Peak, The Little Stranger, and The Love Witch.

The TV series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) brings many classic Gothic characters together in a psychological thriller set in the dark corners of Victorian London.

The Oscar-winning Korean film Parasite has also been called Gothic – specifically, Revolutionary Gothic.

Recently, the Netflix original The Haunting of Hill House and its successor The Haunting of Bly Manor have integrated classic Gothic conventions into modern psychological horror.

Scholarship
Educators in literary, cultural, and architectural studies appreciate the Gothic as an area that facilitates investigation of the beginnings of scientific certainty. As Carol Senf has stated, "the Gothic was... a counterbalance produced by writers and thinkers who felt limited by such a confident worldview and recognized that the power of the past, the irrational, and the violent continue to sway in the world." As such, the Gothic helps students better understand their doubts about the self-assurance of today's scientists. Scotland is the location of what was probably the world's first postgraduate program to consider the genre exclusively: the MLitt in the Gothic Imagination at the University of Stirling, first recruited in 1996.

title: Gothic fiction


text:
Talk:Gothic fiction

Schauerliteratur (Schauerroman) and its inclusion in this article
In order to separate this particular issue, I am opening this subsection. I am firmly against removal of examples of Schauerliteratur from this article, as most scientific studies and books on the subject refer to this either as German alternative word for "gothic fiction" ("gotische literatur" is rarely used in German language, even for English gothic novels) or, at least, for the late-18th/early-19th century German variant of gothic fiction. Even the German wiki page on "gothic fiction" uses the term "Schauerliteratur": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schauerliteratur StjepanHR (talk) 19:41, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

German wiki articles refering to famous gothic novels as "Schauerroman/literatur": As we can see from the article on Melmoth the Wanderer, the German speakers simply use the term as an alternative to "gothic novel".StjepanHR (talk) 19:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_(Roman)
 * https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udolphos_Geheimnisse
 * https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Schloss_von_Otranto
 * https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melmoth_der_Wanderer (refered to as "der beste englischsprachige Schauerroman", or "the best English language Schauerroman")
 * https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_(Roman)
 * The first sentence eliminated in your most recent reversion was "It was not merely in literature that a medieval revival made itself felt, and this too contributed to a culture ready to accept a perceived medieval work in 1764." -which was first Retrieved 26 MARCH 2016! Must you take a sledge hammer to everyone's work? Manannan67 (talk) 20:02, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't get it, I was reverting to this version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gothic_fiction&oldid=1034391145 StjepanHR (talk) 20:07, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * And must You remove everything me and other users contributed over the years, with all the relevant literature cited? P.S. As much as I see, the sentnce YOu have mentioned is still in the version I have revertd back to. StjepanHR (talk) 20:08, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * If Schauerliteratur is nothing more than the German for Gothic Literature its inclusion would appear to contribute little to this page, particularly since none of the authors referred to in the German section of this article are mentioned in Schauerliteratur. Schiller's The Robbers is part of the " Sturm und Drang " movement. He himself is identified with Weimar Classicism. Manannan67 (talk) 20:29, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The German article was probably created before this one was expanded and the German creators haven't updated it. As for the rauber- and ritterroman, the reorganization of this article some time ago resulted in some sentences not being clearly referenced, see here for the references for each statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gothic_fiction&oldid=805439827 . Source for The Robbers is "Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000" and are mentioned more as a general influence on Rauberroman(bandit novel), which the authors consider to be sometimes close to "gothic novel", depending on the theme (bandits were also present in British gothic novel). It doesn't matter if Schiller belonged to the Sturm und Drang, he wrote The Ghost Seer, which is undisputed gothic novel/Scauerroman. His "membership" is Sturm and Drang is not a synonym with "didn't write Schauerroman". StjepanHR (talk) 20:39, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The Ghost Seer is Horrorliteratur, as is Spiess' Das Petermännchen. It is apparent that Schauerroman is being used for a synonym for "English Gothic literature" and doesn't even discuss German literature. As such, it is immaterial. Schwarze Romantik might be somewhat related, but that is discussed elsewhere. Popular Revenants is Cusack, and he says, "Benedikte Naubert's novel Hermann of Unna (1788) is seen as being very close to the Schauerroman genre" which would seem to suggest that he sees it as a separate genre. So, either it's identical, in which case, it adds nothing; or it's something related, but different, in which case it only needs a very brief mention. If there were a comparable article, as there is for the French Fantastique, it would be easier just to link to it. (Please note the discussion above that both the architecture and and the Female Gothic sections are too large. Your overly exuberant reversions also undid any cleanup in those areas.)Manannan67 (talk) 20:51, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

First the Schauerliteratur article is invoked apparently to justify a listing of German authors in an article on Gothic Literature. Then when it appears that article does not mention any German authors, it is supposed that it just hasn't recently been updated. This is nonsense. The German authors were listed here in late 2018. The Germanwiki article was last updated in March of this year. There was ample opportunity to include them if the editors wished to. Clearly those over on Germanwiki see the Schauerliteratur article as a discussion of ENGLISH Gothic Literature. Manannan67 (talk) 21:28, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Weighing in briefly as someone who has studied the Gothic -- I have always learned Schauerroman as the German term for gothic novels, which directly influenced or were even the source for the English gothic tradition in the 1790s. The various German gothics are, to my understanding, a subcategory of Gothic similar to the way Southern Gothic is a subcategory of Gothic -- the sort of topic that merits its own article and also some coverage here. I also think it's important to give enough space to the Schauerroman that we don't imply that the Gothic is a solely British phenomenon; the British themselves, in the 1790s, often considered it a foreign phenomenon entering Britain from Germany or France. All of which supports StjepanHR's arguments about the gothic. However, in terms of writing a useful article: given the very broad topic of "Gothic fiction" (which, given the inclusion of poetry, should perhaps be "Gothic literature"?) the only feasible approach to this article would seem to be having a few paragraphs on each chronological or geographical subcategory, linking outward to the full article on each. Frankly, even the current section on Walpole, Reeve, etc, could perhaps be reduced here and mostly covered in an article on British Gothic novels in the 18thC. The categories themselves should probably be sourced to an overall history of the Gothic, of which there are very many (one of the reasons I have not attempted these edits myself...). Much of the current material in the article seems odd in its emphasis, and often "narrativizes" a great deal, while also leaving out important information like the discourse of horror vs terror, the relation to supernatural superstition broadly (eg EJ Clery's Rise of Supernatural Fiction), the role of the gothic in feminist & queer studies, etc. Even though I agree with StjepanHR that Schauerroman is a synonym for Gothic novel, overall I am in favor of a simplification of the current article along the lines of what Manannan67 is doing, with details being moved outward to more specific articles. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 03:12, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

 * Thank You for Your opinion, L. I think we should maybe do the following:
 * reduce the sections of individual writers in "Early Gothic romances" sections and move the content to the individual authors' pages.
 * leave the section "Contemporary developments in Germany, France and Russia" as it is
 * delete the list in "Matthew Lewis and the turn of the 19th century", after making sure that alllof them are lsited in the related List of gothic fiction works page, which I have created many years ago
 * leave the next few sections as it is
 * reduce Other media and move it to the Gothic film page, AFTER making sure none of the content is lost
 * maybe create new article for "Elements of Gothic fiction"? StjepanHR (talk) 07:11, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Early Gothic Romance section
I have reverted this section to the last version by Manannan67, double checking that no info is lost. I have removed the table, but feel free to put it back, if both of you (Mannannan and L.) think it is better that way. Also, I would like to hear both of your opinion on wheather the table in Matthew Lewis and the turn of the 19th century should be left or removed? StjepanHR (talk) 03:43, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually it does not appear to be restored to my last edit, as it currently reflects neither the improved chronology nor 's very helpful organization and summation of the Elements. Manannan67 (talk) 07:05, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * It is, only I forgot to move one paragraph to "Otranto" page (my mistake), the sections on Reeve and Radcliffe are like your last edit. Of course, we can't move everything to your last edit at the same time, it is important not to lose any information. Just be patient and most of the article would be reorganised. StjepanHR (talk) 08:13, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually you can. You could've done a simple rollback of your edits. Nothing is lost, since if it isn't here, it's at the Main|Dark Romanticism. You have no idea how much you've undone, and I very much doubt you can patch it together piecemeal.Manannan67 (talk) 15:27, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Look, I don't know why are You so unfriendly (to put it that way) towards me. As You can see, I am open to a compromise, but that doesn't mean that everything should go Your way (or my way, it doesn't matter). A lot of it would probably be the way You wanted, but that doesn't mean I, and other users, should accept every suggestion of Yours like it is a Holy Scripture. I have invested a lot of my time to internationalize this article (pretty much everything writen about German, French and Russian gothic fiction here is my work, see edits from August 2012). List of gothic fiction works was created by me and I have contributed to 91.3% of the text there ( https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/List_of_gothic_fiction_works ) and I certainly wouldn't invest that much of my time into it if I wasn't really passionate about the subject. I know that everything I have done can be improved, but let's do it in a cooperative way, as it should be done. Just as I am writing this, I am also writing a scientific paper for a Q1 journal (nothing related to literature, btw). I (my university) am collaborating with one other university, one private company and one state institution on it. Do You really think that any of us has final word on everything? Of course not, everything is a matter of compromise and willingness to improve the work as much as possible. So, I am offering You my cooperation and, if not friendship, then at least mutual respect. If You want to accept it, I will be happy, if not, well, let's at least be polite towards each other. Peace, StjepanHR (talk) 20:28, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

You miss the point entirely, -and have ignored the discussion above, to wit: "Roman noir and Schauerroman belong to a different tradition, they are literary products of a different society, they are not continental examples of the English gothic (another Angst underpins them)...Moreover, there is a common, gloomy zeitgeist among the countries in the period, however, each society has a different literary tradition resulting in distinct meanings for the horrors." And "The Roman noir and the Schauerroman are characterised as 'parallel Romantic literary movements', not as Gothic!" Given the demonstrated ambiguity regarding the term "Schauerroman", I suggest instead Schwarze Romantik. If you're so enthusiastic about continental versions, then perhaps you can come up with a Russian equivalent term. (-that section is entirely UNDUE). I am not recommending that there be no mention of the other European traditions, I'm suggesting that it be trimmed with a link to the appropriate Main. As far as your perception of a less than "friendly" tone, you have gutted an entire article with an overbroad reversion only to preserve your own largely irrelevant entries. Hello? Manannan67 (talk) 21:30, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Ok, let's take this point-by-point:
 * As, whose profession is literature studies, stated, treating Schauerroman and roman noir separately from British gothic is the same as treating Southern Gothic differently. I mean, they are certainly (slightly) different, but they are all forms of gothic fiction. I doubt that You can find scholarly opinion to contradict that (if YOu can, I stand corrected, but please, provide it first)
 * Although I can read Russian very well (and am able to speak it well enough to have conversation), I certainly won't do it, as I have already explained it here by citing much more relevant people than both YOu and me put together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction#Russia ; as You can see that English-language scholars use the term "gothic":
 * Cornwell, Neil (1999), The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, Amsterdam: Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, volume 33
 * Simpson, Mark S. (1986), The Russian Gothic Novel and its British Antecedents, Slavica Publishers
 * Russian scholars were mostly using the term "фантастика" (fantastika) during the Soviet period and sometimes "мистика" ("mystique" - for example, many Soviet film scholars would refer to gothic horror films as "мистическая драма", this term is sometimes used even today: https://fantlab.ru/work246600 (2002, "Мистика Серебряного века"), renamed in 2009 to "Готическая проза Серебряного века") or here: https://fantlab.ru/work132440 ), which is much less precise. However, recently, many articles, short story collections and monographies were published even in Russian language, with the term "готический" ("gothic") in its title, such as (if you don't read Russian, just use the "translate" function in Your browser):
 * https://fantlab.ru/work370545
 * https://fantlab.ru/work620767
 * https://fantlab.ru/work138824
 * https://fantlab.ru/work395925
 * https://fantlab.ru/work120992 (this is arguably the most important one, containing works such as: https://fantlab.ru/work121007, https://fantlab.ru/work121008 and https://fantlab.ru/work121009)
 * https://fantlab.ru/work125169
 * https://fantlab.ru/work90257
 * And this is just a quick search in Fantlab and only the works that have the word "gothic" in their title. StjepanHR (talk) 22:15, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * One additional comment: You seem to repeat the opinions of two users - and , both irrelevant, since the Wiki is based on scholarly opinions, not the users' opinions. Here are some scholarly opinions on "roman noir":
 * https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239285 ("gothic" used in English-language title, "noir" in French)
 * https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781526125699/9781526125699.00007.xml ("...the realm of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century horror novel, specifically with regard to its British manifestation (where it was known as the Gothic novel) and its various French forms (ie the roman noir, which flourished...")
 * The Gothic Quest - A History of the Gothic Novel from the 1930s, in which Montague Summers cites several studies by M. Heine on "gothic fiction" (his word), which have in title "roman noir"
 * https://www.jstor.org/stable/4149302 : here is an excellent description of the change of use of the term "roman noir" with time, as it originally meant "French gothic novel" and now means something along the line of "thriller", sometimes causing the confusion (for example, Roman noir now redirects to the new meaning of the term and we would firstly need to create a new article on original "roman noir" in order to remove the text from this main article)
 * Le roman terrifiant ou roman noir: de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe et son... : has an entire chapter on Walpole and Reeve as pioneers of "roman noir"
 * Réveils gothiques. Émergence du roman noir anglais (1764-1824) : again, refers to "English gothic novel" as "roman noir anglais" StjepanHR (talk) 23:01, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I remind you that you are the one who brought up "Schauerroman/Schauerliteratur" which as it turns out doesn't discuss continental authors. Manannan67 (talk) 23:20, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Uf, have You even read the article? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schauerliteratur#Vertreter_in_Deutschland StjepanHR (talk) 23:32, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

And, surprise, guess how the German-speaking scholars refer to some of the French authors listed in List of gothic fiction works? Hint: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/17053/ StjepanHR (talk) 23:41, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

 * One final thing, you seem to say "you have gutted an entire article with an overbroad reversion only to preserve your own largely irrelevant entries". This is how the article looked while I was mor involved with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gothic_fiction&oldid=508991302 . I hate how the article looks now and am all for improving it. However, we must do it by making sure NO CONTENT IS LOST. For example, YOu have removed The Black Spider with an explanation that "it is Biedermeier". Nobody would argue that it was written as a part of that period, but it does not mean it it not a work of gothic fiction, as more competent scholars than two of us have noted. StjepanHR (talk) 23:49, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
 * If you hate how the article presently looks, you have only yourself to thank. There was nothing removed that couldn't have been easily reinstated; you, however chose to obliterate every edit going back two weeks, much of which merely re-organized sections into better chronology. That's a tad excessive. Manannan67 (talk) 00:31, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
 * An You know what I hate more than the LOOK of the article? The loss of content built during the past decade and a half resulting from Your premature decisions and impatiance to do it the right way, slowly and step-by-step, consulting the other editors during the process. Next time make sure that You only REORGANIZE the article not REMOVE the content without adding it to separate articles. Feel free to bring this to Dispute resolution, as it seems we are in a stalemate. Kind regards, StjepanHR (talk) 00:38, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

This article needs help
I tied up the contemporary gothic subsection some months back, but the rest of this article is dearly in need of help.

 * The opening is just a parade of author names that provides very little useful information to the reader (compare the article on Horror fiction, which actually provides a reputable definition and lists elements found in the genre). The subsections are organised rather randomly.
 * The word contemporary is used in both of its (opposite) meanings (compare Contemporary developments in Germany, France and Russia vs Contemporary Gothic, which cover the 19th century and the 21st respectively), which only helps to confuse the new reader.
 * The top image (The Abbey in the Oakwood) is only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Surely there is an illustration from one of the out of copyright classic gothic novels we can use?
 * The section titled Precursors has good content, but its not actually about precursor genres. Instead it a mixture of explaining the elements of gothic literature, and describing early gothic and pre-gothic novels. These perhaps should be separated into two sections. The article as a whole has a weak section that actually explains the characteristics of Gothic literature, and some of this content could be expanded into that, while the rest can be folded into the wider history section.
 * The article is generally lacking in 21st century sources, which is honestly disappointing to see and severely hurting its coverage of the last 30 years of Gothic literature. The Gothic Studies Journal, Studies in Gothic Fiction, as well as Aeternum - the Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, and the Dark Arts Journal should surely have some useful material. There have also been many published books on this topic over the last 20 years.
 * Addition to this - There is just one reference published in the last 5 years.

 * The placement of Elements of Gothic fiction last should seriously be reconsidered. This section also needs more citations, and focuses heavily on quotes instead of descriptions of the characteristics. There are also certain wording issues that make me question if sections have been copied wholesale from published books. For example "As the review states, the virginal maiden character is above inspection as her personality is flawless". (What review?)

Before I begin rewriting it wholesale, I would like feedback on the points I have raised above.  JT dale Talk ~ 09:19, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

 * I generally agree with it. I think it would be best to create sandbox page for the new version of "Precursors", but I don't think the other edits should be controversial (as long as there isn't removal of current information, like in the previous attempt to "improve" this article :) ). StjepanHR (talk) 12:51, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Reorganised page structure
I have reorganised the page structure as the very first step in trying to rein this article in. However, it remains an unwieldy disaster. There are simply too many topics being covered simultaneously, and without much organisation, while also approaching the topic in potentially too academic a manner for Wikipedia.

Continuing issues of note
 * The female Gothic and The Supernatural Explained is a very unwieldy section, which attempts to provide good information but gets sidetracked to provide a plot synopsis of Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest.
 * History is divided into many competing sections, not always ordered chronologically. Some subsections seem to be superfluous or repeating information provided elsewhere, or worded in such a way that I seem to be missing what they're trying to contribute.
 * Particularly the entire Precursors section seems unnecessarily long and divided - surely what it is trying to say can be said more concisely and combined into one section that outlines the same information?
 * Southern gothic is nothing but a list of author names, providing entirely no information to the reader about what really defines Southern gothic.
 * Contemporary gothic remains in need of expansion, as does the section on Scholarship — Preceding unsigned comment added by JTdale (talk • contribs)

 * Thanks for wading in here, . I agree that there are a lot of longstanding flaws in this article. I made some structural edits myself just now but there is still much to do. Some thoughts:
 * The "female gothic & explained supernatural" section was especially bad since (as a subject area expert) I would say those two things are not particularly linked except in Radcliffe specifically. I moved some of the explained supernatural stuff to the section on Radliffe and tried to edit the female gothic bits down to just the least-incoherent, but it's still a quite bad summary of what is actually a very large and robust body of scholarship. (It should reference, eg, Madwoman in the Attic, and the famous piece on Bluebeard.) In general, removing unsourced content might be a way to usefull condense the article.
 * Gothic fiction should have all those examples reduced to a single sentence with a wikilink -- if the specific examples are well-sourced they can be moved to the novel's own page.
 * I tried to improve the images a bit, but a lot of them still seem decorative, rather than meaningfully linked to the subject matter per MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE-- eg 19thC paintings next to a discussion of unrelated 18thC books. Going through and writing more thorough captions for all of them can probably help diagnose which ones don't belong where they are.
 * I'm not convinced that a "characteristics" section can actually exist in a meaningful way. Over 250 years across multiple countries, the Gothic has had a lot of characteristics. If we boil it down, anything that goes in a pan-Gothic overview ought to be applicable to all of The Castle of Otranto, Jane Eyre, The Telltale Heart, and The Sound and the Fury. To avoid an OR, some kind of literary encyclopedia on the Gothic might be the best source.
 * It was invigorating to see this article moving around. I don't have time to edit in a sustained way at this moment but hope to keep poking in. ~ L 🌸  (talk) 22:26, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

 * Thank you for your contributions. I agree re: the images, the plate for The Castle of Otranto at the top seems to be the most relevant of all the images presently.
 * Personally, I think that a characteristics section can definitely be crafted in such a way that it remains useful. For example, I think that Translation as a Framing Device is (correctly) referenced as a common characteristic, but the key remains to explain them in a way that provides an inclusive definition not an exclusive one - many Gothic novels use this device, but not all.

 * Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst provides a definition that might be a useful stepping off point for us -

"As Gothic ages, it has moved beyond its origins in architecture and the printed page to become fully transmedial, its tropes and motifs recurring in novels, films, television, fine art, comics, fashion, computer games, and the dark web of the internet itself. Gothic plots often revolve around ideas of transgression, the breaching of boundaries of life and death, good taste and bad, knowledge and belief..."

 * Throughout the book he then identifies a series of tropes he believes characterize Gothic (specifically as an entire artistic movement, not just literature) - The pointed arch, ruins, the fragment (his term for the device of a Gothic story being told as if translated or part of a lost manuscript), labrinyths, the framing device of the Gothic house, the landscape, monsters. He also has a section expanding on the various regional variants as divided by compass directions.  JT dale Talk ~ 06:18, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Gothic fiction


text:
Gospel

Gospel (εὐαγγέλιον; evangelium) originally meant the Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus, culminating in his trial and death and concluding with various reports of his post-resurrection appearances. Modern biblical scholars are cautious of relying on the gospels uncritically, but nevertheless, they provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus, and critical study can attempt to distinguish the original ideas of Jesus from those of the later Christian authors.

The canonical gospels are the four which appear in the New Testament of the Bible. They were probably written between AD 66 and 110. Most scholars hold that all four were anonymous (with the modern names of the "Four Evangelists" added in the 2nd century), almost certainly none were by eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmission. According to the majority of scholars, Mark was the first to be written, using a variety of sources, followed by Matthew and Luke, which both independently used Mark for their narrative of Jesus's career, supplementing it with a collection of sayings called "the Q source", and additional material unique to each. There is near-consensus that John had its origins as the hypothetical Signs Gospel thought to have been circulated within a Johannine community.

Many non-canonical gospels were also written, all later than the four canonical gospels, and like them advocating the particular theological views of their various authors. Important examples include the gospels of Thomas, Peter, Judas, and Mary; infancy gospels such as that of James (the first to introduce the perpetual virginity of Mary); and gospel harmonies such as the Diatessaron.

Etymology
Gospel is the Old English translation of the Hellenistic Greek term εὐαγγέλιον, meaning "good news"; this may be seen from analysis of ευαγγέλιον (εὖ "good" + ἄγγελος "messenger" + -ιον diminutive suffix). The Greek term was Latinized as evangelium in the Vulgate, and translated into Latin as bona annuntiatio. In Old English, it was translated as gōdspel (gōd "good" + spel "news"). The Old English term was retained as gospel in Middle English Bible translations and hence remains in use also in Modern English.

Contents
The four canonical gospels share the same basic outline of the life of Jesus: he begins his public ministry in conjunction with that of John the Baptist, calls disciples, teaches and heals and confronts the Pharisees, dies on the cross and is raised from the dead. Each has its own distinctive understanding of him and his divine role and scholars recognize that the differences of detail among the gospels are irreconcilable, and any attempt to harmonize them would only disrupt their distinct theological messages.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are termed the synoptic gospels because they present very similar accounts of the life of Jesus. Mark begins with the baptism of the adult Jesus and the heavenly declaration that he is the son of God; he gathers followers and begins his ministry, and tells his disciples that he must die in Jerusalem but that he will rise; in Jerusalem, he is at first acclaimed but then rejected, betrayed, and crucified, and when the women who have followed him come to his tomb, they find it empty. Mark never calls Jesus "God" or claims that he existed prior to his earthly life, apparently believes that he had a normal human parentage and birth, and makes no attempt to trace his ancestry back to King David or Adam; it originally ended at Mark 16:8 and had no post-resurrection appearances, although Mark 16:7, in which the young man discovered in the tomb instructs the women to tell "the disciples and Peter" that Jesus will see them again in Galilee, hints that the author knew of the tradition.

The authors of Matthew and Luke added infancy and resurrection narratives to the story they found in Mark, although the two differ markedly. Each also makes subtle theological changes to Mark: the Markan miracle stories, for example, confirm Jesus' status as an emissary of God (which was Mark's understanding of the Messiah), but in Matthew they demonstrate his divinity, and the "young man" who appears at Jesus' tomb in Mark becomes a radiant angel in Matthew. Luke, while following Mark's plot more faithfully than Matthew, has expanded on the source, corrected Mark's grammar and syntax, and eliminated some passages entirely, notably most of chapters 6 and 7.

John, the most overtly theological, is the first to make Christological judgements outside the context of the narrative of Jesus's life. He presents a significantly different picture of Jesus's career, omitting any mention of his ancestry, birth and childhood, his baptism, temptation and transfiguration; his chronology and arrangement of incidents is also distinctly different, clearly describing the passage of three years in Jesus's ministry in contrast to the single year of the synoptics, placing the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning rather than at the end, and the Last Supper on the day before Passover instead of being a Passover meal. The Gospel of John is the only gospel to call Jesus God, and in contrast to Mark, where Jesus hides his identity as messiah, in John he openly proclaims it.

Composition

Like the rest of the New Testament, the four gospels were written in Greek. The Gospel of Mark probably dates from c. AD 66–70, Matthew and Luke around AD 85–90, and John AD 90–110. Despite the traditional ascriptions, most scholars hold that all four are anonymous and most scholars agree that none were written by eyewitnesses. A few scholars defend the traditional ascriptions or attributions, but for a variety of reasons, the majority of scholars have abandoned this view or hold it only tenuously.

In the immediate aftermath of Jesus' death, his followers expected him to return at any moment, certainly within their own lifetimes, and in consequence there was little motivation to write anything down for future generations, but as eyewitnesses began to die, and as the missionary needs of the church grew, there was an increasing demand and need for written versions of the founder's life and teachings. The stages of this process can be summarized as follows:
 * Oral traditions – stories and sayings passed on largely as separate self-contained units, not in any order;
 * Written collections of miracle stories, parables, sayings, etc., with oral tradition continuing alongside these;
 * Written proto-gospels preceding and serving as sources for the gospels – the dedicatory preface of Luke, for example, testifies to the existence of previous accounts of the life of Jesus.
 * Gospels formed by combining proto-gospels, written collections, and still-current oral tradition.

Mark is generally agreed to be the first gospel; it uses a variety of sources, including conflict stories (Mark 2:1–3:6), apocalyptic discourse (4:1–35), and collections of sayings, although not the sayings gospel known as the Gospel of Thomas, and probably not the hypothesized Q source used by Matthew and Luke. The authors of Matthew and Luke, acting independently, used Mark for their narrative of Jesus' career, supplementing it with the hypothesized collection of sayings called the Q source and additional material unique to each called the M source (Matthew) and the L source (Luke). Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called the synoptic gospels because of their close similarities of content, arrangement, and language. The authors and editors of John may have known the synoptics, but did not use them in the way that Matthew and Luke used Mark. There is a near-consensus that this gospel had its origins as a "signs" source (or gospel) that circulated within the Johannine community (which produced John and the three epistles associated with the name) and later expanded with a Passion narrative as well as a series of discourses.

All four also use the Jewish scriptures, by quoting or referencing passages, interpreting texts, or alluding to or echoing biblical themes. Such use can be extensive: Mark's description of the Parousia (second coming) is made up almost entirely of quotations from scripture. Matthew is full of quotations and allusions, and although John uses scripture in a far less explicit manner, its influence is still pervasive. Their source was the Greek version of the scriptures, called the Septuagint; they do not seem familiar with the original Hebrew.

Genre and historical reliability
The consensus among modern scholars is that the gospels are a subset of the ancient genre of bios, or ancient biography. Ancient biographies were concerned with providing examples for readers to emulate while preserving and promoting the subject's reputation and memory; the gospels were never simply biographical, they were propaganda and kerygma (preaching). As such, they present the Christian message of the second half of the first century AD, and as Luke's attempt to link the birth of Jesus to the census of Quirinius demonstrates, there is no guarantee that the gospels are historically accurate.

The majority view among critical scholars is that the authors of Matthew and Luke based their narratives on Mark's gospel, editing him to suit their own ends, and the contradictions and discrepancies among these three versions and John make it impossible to accept both traditions as equally reliable with regard to the historical Jesus. In addition, the gospels read today have been edited and corrupted over time, leading Origen to complain in the 3rd century that "the differences among manuscripts have become great, ... [because copyists] either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please". Most of these are insignificant, but many are significant, an example being Matthew 1:18, altered to imply the pre-existence of Jesus. For these reasons, modern scholars are cautious of relying on the gospels uncritically. Nevertheless, they do provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus, and critical study can attempt to distinguish the original ideas of Jesus from those of later authors.

Scholars usually agree that John is not without historical value: certain of its sayings are as old or older than their synoptic counterparts, and its representation of the topography around Jerusalem is often superior to that of the synoptics. Its testimony that Jesus was executed before, rather than on, Passover, might well be more accurate, and its presentation of Jesus in the garden and the prior meeting held by the Jewish authorities are possibly more historically plausible than their synoptic parallels. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that the author had direct knowledge of events, or that his mentions of the Beloved Disciple as his source should be taken as a guarantee of his reliability.

Textual history and canonisation
The oldest gospel text known is, a fragment of John dating from the first half of the 2nd century. The creation of a Christian canon was probably a response to the career of the heretic Marcion (c. 85–160), who established a canon of his own with just one gospel, the Gospel of Marcion, similar to the Gospel of Luke. The Muratorian canon, the earliest surviving list of books considered (by its own author at least) to form Christian scripture, included Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Irenaeus of Lyons went further, stating that there must be four gospels and only four because there were four corners of the Earth and thus the Church should have four pillars. He referred to the four collectively as the "fourfold gospel" (euangelion tetramorphon).

Non-canonical (apocryphal) gospels
The many apocryphal gospels arose from the 1st century onward, frequently under assumed names to enhance their credibility and authority, and often from within branches of Christianity that were eventually branded heretical. They can be broadly organised into the following categories:
 * Infancy gospels: arose in the 2nd century, including the Gospel of James, also called the Protoevangelium, which was the first to introduce the concept of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the unrelated Coptic Gospel of Thomas), both of which related many miraculous incidents from the life of Mary and the childhood of Jesus that are not included in the canonical gospels.
 * Ministry gospels
 * Sayings gospels and agrapha
 * Passion, resurrection and post-resurrection gospels
 * Gospel harmonies: in which the four canonical gospels are combined into a single narrative, either to present a consistent text or to produce a more accessible account of Jesus' life.

The apocryphal gospels can also be seen in terms of the communities which produced them:
 * The Jewish-Christian gospels are the products of Christians of Jewish origin who had not given up their Jewish identity: they regarded Jesus as the messiah of the Jewish scripture but did not agree that he was God, an idea which, although central to Christianity as it eventually developed, is contrary to Jewish beliefs.
 * Gnostic gospels uphold the idea that the universe is the product of a hierarchy of gods, of whom the Jewish god is a rather low-ranking member. Gnosticism holds that Jesus was entirely "spirit", and that his earthly life and death were therefore only an appearance, not a reality. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment.

title: Gospel