Article #7 The Expanding Gothic: The move from
the outlines to the city
The Expanding
Gothic: The move
from the outlines to
the city Abstract
The Gothic mode of literature, upon its initial conception, existed
at a distance from its readership geographically, and historically.
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is considered to
be the first Gothic novel, is tied to Medieval origins and placed
distinctly as not in England. In this essay, however, I will focus on
the Victorian revival of Gothic literature which eradicates some
of the historical and geographical distance by allowing Gothic
texts to take place in the city. This indicates a shift in social fears
which coincide with aspects such as the industrial revolution, the
forming of police forces and the introduction of modern science.
This paper will discuss how these novels remain true to their
Gothic core despite losing the stereotypical setting and will look
into other genres such as the Urban Gothic and the Detective
genre to interrogate how Gothic the Victorian revival is.
Author: Daisy Cowley
Keywords: Gothic,
Urban Gothic,
Detective, City
Keywords: Gothic, Urban Gothic, Detective, City
At the time of its conception, Gothic literature was considered
to be a low form of art. Read predominantly by women, it was
viewed as farcical nonsense - it was definitely not seen as a
literary - not in a way we consider it, read it or study it today.
However, there is still a stigma surrounding Gothic novels which
centres around the opinion that they all adhere to similar atypical
Gothic conventions. Thus, I think it would be insightful to here
define a few definitions of the Gothic novel. Traditionally, the
Gothic can be defined by its tropes, that we are all familiar with;
the entrapped maiden, the tyrannical villain or monster, the use
of the supernatural and the repeated image of decay and also
the atypical scary house illuminated by lightning. The Castle of
Otranto, published in 1764 and most commonly regarded as
the first Gothic novel, contains all of these tropes. However,
while Walpole’s contemporaries wrote in a similar style, the
Gothic genre has evolved greatly throughout its existence. The
genre has since been defined by critics Catherine Spooner and
Emma McEvoy in a manner which allows the genre to surpass
the generic tropes of eighteenth-century Gothic. Spooner and
McEvoy define the updated view of the Gothic based on “its
emphasis on the returning past, its dual interest in transgression
and decay, its commitment to exploring the aesthetics of fear and
its cross-contamination of reality and fear” (Spooner and McEvoy,
48