From the eerie corridors of ancient strongholds to the depths of ancestral secrets, The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron are captivating works of classic horror with significant influence in the history of gothic fiction. Esteemed and highly influential, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) was England's first gothic horror novel, but when Clara Reeve rewrote the story as The Old English Baron (1778) over thirty years later, her work was received with heavy criticism. With looming curses and familial treachery, both works are set in the medieval era with atmospheres steeped in relentless suspense. Yet, where Walpole's prolific work blurs the line between realism and the supernatural, Reeve rewrote the fantastical story with features of naturalism for the modern reader. Discover the origins of gothic fiction in these two prolific novels and read their comparisons and critiques in this volume's featured excerpts by H. P. Lovecraft and Montague Summers.

The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. In this volume, fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called 'Gothic story') to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

The Castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole in 1764, is credited as being the original gothic novel. The first edition claimed to be a translation of an ancient, 16th-century?Italian manuscript, which had been recently discovered among the belongings of a Catholic family in the north of England. Furthermore, that manuscript was said to have its roots in tales from the time of the Crusades. All of this intrigue, of course, served to make the novel an instant success and launched the gothic fiction craze. This volume contains not only Walpole's story, but a brief biography of him written by later gothic novelist, Clara Reeve. She credits The Castle of Otranto with having influenced her book, The Old English Baron, which is also included here.