Gothic Fiction

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 30. Chapters: Tim Burton, Joyce Carol Oates, Anti-Catholicism in literature and media, Lenore, List of Gothic Fiction works, Oliviu Craznic, American Gothic Fiction, Gothic Blue Books, Lisa Tuttle, Translation of the Eighteenth century Gothic novel, Dan Ross, Elements of American Gothic, Paul Marlowe, Catherine Selden, Dracula Society, Texas gothic. Excerpt: Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story." The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the Gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. The ruins of Gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations-thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such Anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic institutions...