Gothic Novel

Gothic Novel, type of Romantic fiction that predominated in English literature in the last third of the 18th century and the first two decades of the 19th, the setting for which was usually a ruined Gothic castle or abbey. The Gothic novel, or romance, emphasized mystery and horror and was filled with ghost-haunted rooms, underground passages, and secret stairways. The principal writers of the English Gothic romance were Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve, who wrote The Champion of Virtue (1777); Ann Radcliffe, with The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Gregory Lewis, with Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795); Charles Robert Maturin, who wrote The Fatal Revenge (1807); and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein (1818). Charles Brockden Brown, the first American professional novelist, is best known for his Gothic romances. The genre was one phase of the Romantic Movement in English literature and was also the forerunner of the modern mystery novel. The term Gothic is used to designate narrative prose or poetry of which the principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural.