Gothic Novel

The Gothic novel is a variety of the novel that arose in English literature of the second half of the eighteenth century and cultivated an atmosphere of mystery, horror, and the supernatural: the action takes place in gloomy medieval castles, monasteries, and ruins, among ghosts, ancestral curses, and fatal secrets. The Gothic novel appeals to the emotions of fear and the sublime and combines mystery, crime, love, and death. The founder of the genre was Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764); classic examples are Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The Gothic novel influenced Romanticism and later horror literature. In Ukrainian literature a kindred phenomenon is the mystical-fantastic, demonological prose based on folk beliefs — 'frightful' tales with motifs of the otherworldly — as well as modern Gothic prose that reinterprets the tradition of the mysterious and the eerie on national material.