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 Gothic fiction—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 even before the advent of the Gothic. The need for an outlet for this imagination 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 like
Fonthill Abbey, and even mock tournaments were held. It was not merely in literature that a medieval revival made itself felt, the broader cultural fascination with the medieval era contributed to a society ready to accept a perceived medieval work in 1764. 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." Burke's thoughts on the
Sublime, Terror, and Obscurity helped shape Gothic fiction's emotional and psychological tone. 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.
The Female Gothic From the castles,
dungeons, forests, and hidden passages of the Gothic fiction genre emerged the subgenre, 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 author,
Jane Austen. Gothic fiction 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. Dacre's
Zofloya; or, The Moor is a noted example of an early female Gothic novel which transgresses gender conventions of the female Gothic of the time, with a sexually aggressive female protagonist, Victoria, who pursues partners at her desire. 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." The first work to be labeled as "Gothic" was
Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto (1764). By initiating a literary genre, Walpole's Gothic tale inspired many contemporary imitators, including
Clara Reeve's
The Old English Baron (1778). Reeve writes in the preface: "This Story is the literary offspring of
The Castle of Otranto". In an essay on Radcliffe,
Walter Scott wrote about the popularity of
Udolpho at the time stating, "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." Her 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) was written in response to Lewis's
The Monk (1796). notice in London from October 1795 listing new publications, including many Gothic titles The popularity and influence of
The Mysteries of Udolpho and
The Monk led to the rise in shorter, cheaper versions of Gothic literature. These included
Gothic bluebooks and
chapbooks, many of which were plagiarized or abridged versions 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
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 established by
William Lane at
Leadenhall Street, London in 1790. 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. '' (1818),
Jane Austen's Gothic parody The saturation of Gothic-inspired literature in the 1790s led to criticism, as noted by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a letter dated 16 March 1797. Reflecting on his review work, he wrote, "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 (1813) by
Eaton Stannard Barrett, 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 " by
John William Polidori published in
The New Monthly Magazine, 1 April 1819 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 short story "
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 animation of
Frankenstein's monster and the focus instead on the
moral dilemmas and consequences of such a creation.
Frankenstein is also credited for enhancing the traditional setting in Gothic fiction, in which the ruined castle and haunted room is replaced by a scientist's laboratory.
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. 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 is even mentioned 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. by Gogol 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). Poe is now considered the master of the American Gothic. 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. 's
Jane Eyre (1847) 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. in London 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 (1852–1853) 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.
Miss Havisham from
Great Expectations is one of Dickens' most Gothic characters. The bitter recluse 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 Dostoevsky, 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. 's
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) was a classic Gothic work of the 1880s, seeing many stage adaptations. 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). Gothic fiction became significant in Italy in the later decades of the 19th century, being cultivated particularly by
Scapigliati such as
Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (most notably in his novel
Fosca), Giovanni Faldella, and the brothers
Camillo and
Arrigo Boito. It continued in some of the work of
Giovanni Verga and
Luigi Capuana, who are best known as
veristi, and also in parts of the production of
Emilio De Marchi, Remigio Zena, and, above all,
Antonio Fogazzaro (most notably in his debut novel
Malombra).
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 Dostoevsky 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. 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 in the
1940 film adaptation of
Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca. The success of
Rebecca inspired a revival of interest in Gothic romance in the 20th century. 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. Mervyn Peake's
Titus Groan (1946) saw the development of Gothic fantasy set in an unusual world. s such as
Weird Tales reprinted and popularized Gothic horror from the previous 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.
Gothic romances It is a
subgenre of gothic fiction that began to develop with
Ann Radcliffe's
A Sicilian Romance in 1790, building upon the tropes established by
Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto (1764), such as isolated settings and semi-supernatural occurrences. However, Radcliffe's novels introduced female
protagonists who were "battling through terrifying ordeals while struggling to be with their true loves." This aspect is what ultimately distinguishes gothic romance from its counterpart, gothic horror. 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,
Ray Russell,
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
Māori 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, 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. The
Harry Potter series is also occasionally identified as a "gothic fantasy". ==Other media==