Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, 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.
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician.
Francis Lovell, 9th Baron Lovell, 6th Baron Holand, later 1st Viscount Lovell, KG was an English nobleman who was an ally of King Richard III during the War of the Roses. Sir William Catesby, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and he were among Richard's closest supporters, famously called "the Cat, the Rat and Lovell our dog" in an anti-Ricardian squib. In addition to being an ally, Lovell is described as Richard's best friend.
Robert Jephson was an Irish dramatist and politician.
Earl of Carlisle is a title that has been created three times in the Peerage of England.
The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day gothic books, films, art, music, and the goth subculture.
Clara Reeve was an English novelist best known for the Gothic novel The Old English Baron (1777). She also wrote an innovative history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance (1785). Her first work was a translation from Latin, then an unusual language for a woman to learn. She was a near-contemporary of the bluestockings ladies of Elizabeth Montague's circle.
Edith Birkhead (1889-1951) was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol and a Noble Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She wrote a pioneering work on Gothic literature: The Tale of Terror (1921). This work described the fascination with supernatural fiction in English literature from the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 on to modern times. She included works from Europe as well as America, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
Castle of Otranto is a 1979 Czechoslovak animated short film by Jan Švankmajer. It is based on Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. The film takes the form of a pseudo-documentary live-action story, with an abridged adaptation of the story itself presented in cut-out animation in the style of Gothic art.
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th- and 19th-century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.
James de Barry, 4th Viscount Buttevant and 17th Baron Barry (1520–1581) was an Irish magnate. He joined the rebels in the Desmond Rebellion and died in captivity at Dublin Castle.
The Club or Literary Club is a London dining club founded in February 1764 by the artist Joshua Reynolds and essayist Samuel Johnson.
John FitzPatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory FRS DL, styled 'Lord Gowran' from 1751 to 1758, was an Irish peer and member of parliament.
Events from the 1320s in England.
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck: A Romance is an 1830 historical novel by Mary Shelley about the life of Perkin Warbeck. The book takes a Yorkist point of view and proceeds from the conceit that Perkin Warbeck died in childhood and the supposed impostor was indeed Richard of Shrewsbury. Henry VII of England is repeatedly described as a "fiend" who hates Elizabeth of York, his wife and Richard's sister, and the future Henry VIII, mentioned only twice in the novel, is a vile youth who abuses dogs. Her preface establishes that records of the Tower of London, as well as the histories of Edward Hall, Raphael Holinshed, and Francis Bacon, the letters of Sir John Ramsay to Henry VII that are printed in the Appendix to John Pinkerton's History of Scotland establish this as fact. Each chapter opens with a quotation. The entire book is prefaced with a quotation in French by Georges Chastellain and Jean Molinet.
The novel of manners is a work of fiction that re-creates a social world, conveying with detailed observation the complex of customs, values, and mores of a stratified society. The behavioural conventions (manners) of the society dominate the plot of the story, and characters are differentiated by the degree to which they meet or fail to meet the uniform standard of ideal social behaviour, as established by society.
Rookwood is a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth published in 1834. It is a historical and gothic romance that describes a dispute over the legitimate claim for the inheritance of Rookwood Place and the Rookwood family name.
Strawberry Hill House—often called simply Strawberry Hill—is a Gothic Revival villa that was built in Twickenham, London, by Horace Walpole (1717–1797) from 1749 onward. It is a typical example of the "Strawberry Hill Gothic" style of architecture, and it prefigured the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival.
Romance, is a "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". This genre contrasted with the main tradition of the novel, which realistically depict life. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Walter Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
The eighteenth-century Gothic novel is a genre of Gothic fiction published between 1764 and roughly 1820, which had the greatest period of popularity in the 1790s. These works originated the term "Gothic" to refer to stories which evoked the sentimental and supernatural qualities of medieval romance with the new genre of the novel. After 1820, the eighteenth-century Gothic novel receded in popularity, largely overtaken by the related genre of historical fiction as pioneered by Walter Scott. The eighteenth-century Gothic was also followed by new genres of Gothic fiction like the Victorian penny dreadful.
