1765: English novelist Horace Walpole writes The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, widely considered to be the first gothic novel. The story, set in a haunted castle, lacks some of the more contemporary elements of gothic writing (the story’s pace makes the characteristic suspense of gothic writing rather nonexistent), it laid the basis for terror writing and the gothic as we know it today.
1790: Ann Radcliffe published A Sicilian Romance. Ann Radcliffe is perhaps one of the most popular and best gothic novelists of the 18th century. Catapulting off of Walpole’s concoction of medievalism and horror, Radcliffe adds suspense, develops the well-known ‘dark and rainy night’ atmosphere of gothic fiction, and introduces the complex villain to the narrative. One of her later novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho is considered to be the quintessential Gothic romance.
1798: Charles Brocken Brown writes Wieland, a novel considered to be the first American Gothic novel. Wieland plays on tropes such as religious guilt, mania, and the classical concepts of murdering your family in some externally induced insanity, which later became popularised in other (particularly American) Gothic works.
1818: Jane Austen enters the scene of English literature and publishes Northanger Abbey. While not entirely a Gothic novel, it is one of the first novels to acknowledge the genre of Gothic in its story, with the heroine having a passion for the macabre and Gothic literature.
1818: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is introduced to the world. One of the hallmarks of gothic literature, Frankenstein is one of the greatest works of gothic as well as science fiction, which first displays the concept of the archetypal mad scientist.
1820: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving forever immortalises folk legend of the headless horseman who pursues the unfortunate schoolmaster Ichabod Crane.
1835: Amidst waves of American transcendentalists emerges Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose haunting works draw less on the supernatural and more on the general terror associated with witches, witch-hunts, Puritans, and sinners. Young Goodman Brown and The Scarlet Letter immortalise American colonial Gothic and begin the separation between the variations of English and Victorian Gothic and the rising movements in the United States.
1839: Edgar Allen Poe, perhaps the most famous horror and gothic writer known to America and the world, published The Fall of the House of Usher. Like Hawthorne and other American gothics, Poe relies on the terror imbued in the situation (the literal tearing apart of the members of the clan of Usher) less than the medievalism to terrify his readers.
1847: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is published. What really needs to be said about this absolute giant of a gothic classic? One of the most brilliant and genre-defining works of gothic literature, Wuthering Heights sets the tone for the Victorian Gothic movements in its incorporation of class divides, truly evil personages, and ghosts.
1892: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” enters the scene. Another quintessential classic of gothic literature, this short story masterfully uses the concepts of suspense and psychological horror to tell what is still considered today as a genius work of gothic literature.
1897: The 19th century saw the rise of many genres of gothic literature, one of the most prominent being tales of monsters. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the premiere monster tale in gothic literature, such a staple in the culture of horror writing that we still haven’t been able to move past the use of vampiric creations and suspenseful mansions to this day.
1928: H.P. Lovecraft publishes his iconic short story, “The Call of Cthulhu” which picks up on where Marry Shelley left off and solidifies the connections between sci-fi, horror, and the gothic novel.
1930: The Southern Gothic movement in the United States gains ground and William Faulkner published As I Lay Dying. With writers like Faulkner, Capote, O’Connor, Wolfe, Williams and in more modern days McCarthy the Southern Gothic movement incorporated elements of the traditional gothic into the legends and livings of the Southern American landscape to create a distinctive form of suspense and horror writing.
2020: The tradition of modern gothic has been going on throughout the 21st century. While certain elements of the literary tradition have been lost or changed, in novels like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, the tradition still remains true to its supernatural, suspenseful, and dark roots.
“Gothic Chapel Skyline” by fuzz’ed is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0