Gothic romance

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Gothic romance type of novel that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th cent. in England. Gothic romances were mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror, and they were usually set against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was the forerunner of the type, which included the works of Ann Radcliffe , Matthew Gregory Lewis , and Charles R. Maturin , and the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley . Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey satirizes Gothic romances. The influence of the genre can be found in some works of Coleridge, Le Fanu, Poe, and the Brontës. During the 1960s so-called Gothic novels became enormously popular in England and the United States. Seemingly modeled on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, these novels usually concern spirited young women, either governesses or new brides, who go to live in large gloomy mansions populated by peculiar servants and precocious children and presided over by darkly handsome men with mysterious pasts. Popular practitioners of this genre are Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Catherine Cookson, and Dorothy Eden.

Bibliography: See studies by T. M. Harwell (4 vol., 1985) and D. P. Varma (1987).

Gothic Romance, variety of fiction widely popular in 18th‐century England, whence it spread to the U.S. and throughout Europe, especially influencing German literature. The vogue of medievalism, sensationalism, and supernatural horrors was developed by Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), set in a background of romantic “Gothic” architecture; Beckford's Vathek (1786); M.G. Lewis's The Monk (1795); The Mysteries of Udolpho (1795) and other romances of horror by Ann Radcliffe; and later by Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In the U.S., Charles Brockden Brown was the leading author of Gothic romances, and The Asylum is a typical example of the genre, which strongly influenced such writers about the mysterious and the supernatural as Poe and Hawthorne, although Poe's statement, “the terror of which I write is not of Germany, but of the soul,” is applicable to both of them. In the 1970s and '80s the term was applied to a very different kind of fiction, generally published in paperback editions, addressed to women, broadly but simply plotted stories of sensual relations between a hero and heroine, often also period pieces set in distant and ostensibly romantic periods or places.