Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name is a reference to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Ann Radcliffe was an English novelist and a pioneer of Gothic fiction. Her technique of explaining apparently supernatural elements in her novels has been credited with gaining respectability for Gothic fiction in the 1790s. Radcliffe was the most popular writer of her day and almost universally admired; contemporary critics called her the mighty enchantress and the Shakespeare of romance-writers, and her popularity continued through the 19th century. Interest has revived in the early 21st century, with the publication of three biographies.
The Society of the Friends of the Constitution, renamed the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality after 1792 and commonly known as the Jacobin Club or simply the Jacobins, was the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for political crimes.
The Girondins, or Girondists, were a political group during the French Revolution. From 1791 to 1793, the Girondins were active in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention. Together with the Montagnards, they initially were part of the Jacobin movement. They campaigned for the end of the monarchy, but then resisted the spiraling momentum of the Revolution, which caused a conflict with the more radical Montagnards. They dominated the movement until their fall in the insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793, which resulted in the domination of the Montagnards and the purge and eventual mass execution of the Girondins. This event is considered to mark the beginning of the Reign of Terror.
Marie-Jeanne 'Manon' Roland de la Platière, born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, and best known under the name Madame Roland, was a French revolutionary, salonnière and writer.
Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont, known as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution who assassinated revolutionary and Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat on 13 July 1793.
Charlotte Smith was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) contributed to the revival of the form in England. She also helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of sensibility. Despite ten novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and expected to be remembered for that.
The historiography of the French Revolution stretches back over two hundred years, as commentators and historians have used a vast array of primary sources to explain the origins of the Revolution, and its meaning and its impact. By the year 2000, many historians were saying that the field of the French Revolution was in intellectual disarray. The old model or paradigm focusing on class conflict has been largely abandoned but no new explanatory model had gained widespread support. Nevertheless, there persists a very widespread agreement that the French Revolution was the watershed between the premodern and modern eras of Western history.
Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, baron de Cloots, better known as Anacharsis Cloots, was a Prussian nobleman who was a significant figure in the French Revolution. Perhaps the first to advocate a world parliament, long before Albert Camus and Albert Einstein, he was a world federalist and an internationalist anarchist. He was nicknamed "orator of mankind", "citizen of humanity" and "a personal enemy of God".
Arthur Mervyn, a novel written by Charles Brockden Brown, was published in 1799. One of Brown's more popular novels and representative of Brown's dark, gothic style and subject matter, Arthur Mervyn is also recognized as one of the most influential works of American and Philadelphia Gothic literature. It started earlier as a serial in Philadelphia's Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence, but it was discontinued because the magazine's writers were not keen on the feature and the editor of the magazine died from yellow fever. Hence, Brown decided to issue the book himself. The novel also includes the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia between August–October 1793 as an important plot element.
The Gothic double is a literary motif which refers to the divided personality of a character. Closely linked to the Doppelgänger, which first appeared in the 1796 novel Siebenkäs by Johann Paul Richter, the double figure emerged in Gothic literature in the late 18th century due to a resurgence of interest in mythology and folklore which explored notions of duality, such as the fetch in Irish folklore which is a double figure of a family member, often signifying an impending death.
Eliza Parsons was an English Gothic novelist, best known for The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796). These are two of the seven Gothic titles recommended as reading by a character in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey.
The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) is the most famous novel written by the English Gothic novelist Eliza Parsons. First published in two volumes in 1793, it is among the seven "horrid novels" recommended by the character Isabella Thorpe in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey and an important early work in the genre, predating Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Monk Lewis's The Monk.
Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.
Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?
I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.
Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?
History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni is a travel narrative by the English Romantic authors Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Published anonymously in 1817, it describes two trips taken by Mary, Percy, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont: one across Europe in 1814, and one to Lake Geneva in 1816. Divided into three sections, the text consists of a journal, four letters, and Percy Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc". Apart from the poem, preface, and two letters, the text was primarily written and organised by Mary Shelley. In 1840 she revised the journal and the letters, republishing them in a collection of Percy Shelley's writings.
Helen Craik was a Scottish poet and novelist, and a correspondent of Robert Burns. She praised him for being a "native genius, gay, unique and strong" in an introductory poem to his Glenriddell Manuscripts.
French emigration from the years 1789 to 1815 refers to the mass movement of citizens from France to neighboring countries, in reaction to the instability and upheaval caused by the French Revolution and the succeeding Napoleonic rule. Although began in 1789 as a peaceful effort led by the Bourgeoisie to increase political equality for the Third Estate, the Revolution soon turned into a violent, popular movement. To escape political tensions and, mainly during the Reign of Terror, to save their lives, a number of individuals emigrated from France and settled in the neighboring countries, though a few also went to the Americas.
Beachy Head is a long blank verse poem by the English Romantic poet and novelist Charlotte Turner Smith, published in 1807, the year after her death, as part of the volume Beachy Head and Other Poems. The poem imagines events at the coastal cliffs of Beachy Head from across England's history, to meditate on what Smith saw as the modern corruption caused by commerce and nationalism. It was her last poetic work, and has been described as her most poetically ambitious work. As a Romantic poem, it is notable for its naturalist rather than sublime presentation of the natural world.
"On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because it was Frequented by a Lunatic", also known as Charlotte Smith's Sonnet LXX, is an early Romantic poem which uses imagery of the sea and of madness to express poetic melancholy. It is one of Smith's best-known sonnets. It was first published in 1797, in the eighth edition of Smith's Elegiac Sonnets.
The Emigrants is a narrative blank verse poem by Charlotte Smith first published in 1793.
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.
