What is a gothic novel and what are its main features?
Gothic fiction is ‘a type of romance very popular from the 1760s onwards until the 1820s’ (Cuddon, p. 381). The Gothic novel was a new literary form, rising in the second half of the nineteenth century. It gave room for new topics in literature, for mysterious phenomena, supernatural apparitions, for evil villains and gloomy castles: ‘Most Gothic novels are tales of mystery and horror, intended to chill the spine and curdle the blood. They contain a strong element of the supernatural and have all or most of the and now familiar topography, sites, props presences and happenings’ (Cuddon, p.381). Gothic fiction can be recognized by the presence of certain core-features all of them have in common: Tortuous, fragmented narratives relating mysterious incidents, horrible images and life-threatening pursuits predominate in the eighteenth century. Spectres, monsters, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns, fainting heroines and bandits populate Gothic landscapes as sugges
