The Gothic Novel

Abstract

When applied to fiction the word ‘Gothic’ is used to designate the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel of terror dealing with mediaeval material, whether Romanesque or Gothic. The Gothic novel developed from the novel of sensibility, carrying that form a stage further by introducing elements of fear and suspense. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was of decisive importance. In his treatise Burke conferred on terror a major and worthwhile literary role: ‘whatever... operates in a manner analogous to terror is a source of the sublime’. Thanks to Burke, the excitation of fear became one of the most significant enterprises a novelist could undertake. Thus the Gothic novels employed the agencies of mystery and awe, magic and the supernatural, to arouse terror. Gothic fiction is a literature of nightmare.