Southern Gothic is like its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. For example, Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first true gothic romance, was obsessed with medieval gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for gothic revival (Punter, 2004 177). ![]() It was a fascination with this architecture and its related art, poetry (such as graveyard poets), and even landscape gardening that inspired the first wave of gothic novelists. This literary genre found its most natural settings in the very tall buildings of the Gothic style - often spelled "Gothick", to highlight their "medievalness" - castles, mansions, and monasteries, often remote, crumbling, and ruined. The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, monks, nuns, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, angels, fallen angels, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew and the Devil himself. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets and hereditary curses. 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. 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. ![]() Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. But it could be argued that there are earlier works such as Dante's The Inferno which was written sometime during the 1300s. ![]() It is said that the first batch of Gothic literature to ever be served up was by Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. The recipe for Gothic literature is a dash of romance, a sprig of the supernatural and a pinch of horror. At face value, a link between Edgar Allen Poe and Industrial dance music is not one made easily. The goth subculture came from aesthetics and philosophies and literary traditions reaching out, linking together in a cumulative genealogy, a goth snowball – changing constantly right up to the present day.
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