Nineteenth century '
Bleak House of Tom All Alones, the urban slum credited as a major influence on the development of the genre Early
Gothic fiction tended to use the city as a starting point and then move to rural locations, abandoning the settings and securities of
urban civilization for wild and dangerous rural regions. In the mid-nineteenth century, Gothic novels began either to reverse this process or to be conducted entirely in the modern industrial city, which itself became a zone of
liminality, danger, and adventure, coming to be referred to in the late twentieth century as urban Gothic.
Robert Mighall sees the urban Gothic as a genre arising in London in the mid-nineteenth century out of the critique of the impact of industrialization, leading to the discourse on urban reform that can be seen in
City Mystery genre, including
The Mysteries of Paris (1842–43) and
G. W. M. Reynolds'
Mysteries of London (1844–8) as well as
Charles Dickens'
Oliver Twist (1837–8) and
Bleak House (1854). These pointed to the juxtaposition of wealthy, ordered, and affluent civilization against the disorder and barbarity of the poor within the same metropolis.
Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of
urban fog in the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film. The urban Gothic genre that developed in the Victorian
fin de siècle, beginning with
Robert Louis Stevenson's
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), applied the foggy aesthetic and the Gothic trope of doubling to the city.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores traditional debates about the nature of good and evil through motifs from folklore while incorporating a modern, scientific explanation.
Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) similarly revisits the concept of a
Faustian Pact in a modern social context.
Bram Stoker's
Dracula (1897) presents the eastern fringes of Europe in
Transylvania as a point of origin for the arrival in modern provincial and then metropolitan London society of a creature from folklore.
Twentieth century of
New Orleans at night, part of the distinctive architecture that made it the centre of Gothic novels by authors including
Anne Rice and
Poppy Z. Brite In the early twentieth century, the urban Gothic was extended to other cities, like Paris, such as in
Gaston Leroux's
The Phantom of the Opera (1909–10). and later
Suburban Gothic, which shifted the focus from the urban centre to the residential periphery of modern society. Since the 1980s Gothic horror fiction and urban Gothic in particular has revived as a genre, with series of novels like
Anne Rice's
Vampire Chronicles and
Poppy Z. Brite's
Lost Souls Urban Gothic themes and images were also used in comics and graphic novels, including
Frank Miller's
Daredevil (from 1979),
Batman (from 1986), the
Sin City series (from 1991),
James O'Barr's
The Crow,
Alan Moore's
From Hell (from 1991) and
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999). Urban Gothic aesthetics and themes are also explored in video games by presenting the city as a threat, often as its own character, as in
Silent Hill (1999).
Twenty-first century In more recent scholarships, critics have identified certain works as New Urban Gothic. These novels possess the qualities of the urban gothic novel while moving the setting to include more diverse urban spaces. In the novel, Singapore exists as a Gothic city haunted by the ghosts of war and
colonialism. Urban gothic elements from the Victorian era carry over to twenty-first century dystopian novels, such as
The City and the City by China Miéville. == Film ==