Gothic Literature

Gothic literature is a current of pre-Romanticism and Romanticism (late 18th–19th century) that cultivated an atmosphere of mystery, horror, and the supernatural, depicting gloomy medieval castles, ruins, ghosts, and fatal passions and crimes. The Gothic appealed to the irrational, to the emotions of fear and sublime horror, opposing them to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The founder of the genre is considered to be Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto); classic examples are Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Gothic poetics — the mysterious, the fantastic, the demonological, the play with fear — echoes in the romantic ballads of Taras Shevchenko (The Bewitched Woman, The Drowned Maiden), in the demonological motifs of the prose of Mykola Hohol (Gogol) (Viy, A Terrible Vengeance), which rest on Ukrainian folk mythology, and in modern mystical prose.