Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2014 | Page 70

66 Popular Culture Review novels in its construction of Hogwarts as both physical structure and narrative device. To begin with, there are clear and easy comparisons to be made between Hogwarts and eighteenth-century Gothic castles, especially Horace Walpole’s The Castle o f Otranto (1764), moments at which Rowling is clearly and obviously nodding to the eighteenth-century Gothic castles that came before her. Perhaps the most obvious moment is the setting of Hog ݅