But I think it deserves our attention that the same term is used in different contexts: from medieval architecture to winklepicker shoes! I’m not suggesting that to be someone who enjoys Goth music today you have to know its history. Indeed, the Goth subculture-music, fashion and art-has had remarkable longevity. We should think about horror films, the American Gothic, and popular Gothic culture. So many critics take its heyday as occurring with writers such as Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley.īut neither should we end the story at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most contemporary Gothic literary criticism takes 1764 as its starting point with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto, and then tends to peter out with Bram Stoker’s Draculain 1897. What we now call the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century is part of this wider political context. But at the heart of this way of perceiving political and national identity is the horror that progress is only possible through terrible costs: through executions, cruelty, martyrdoms, and oppression. The Gothic then became the foundation of the Whig theory of history, which highlights progress, extending the franchise, and building a commercial economy. They created the context for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gothic, which connected with national identity, and later with Parliamentarian and Protestant politics. These older motifs, figures, and images were taken up by writers such as William Shakespeare and John Milton. We need to understand how the Goths were contrasted by Renaissance commentators with classical architects and artists-which is why medieval architecture is today still called Gothic architecture.

So we should really be telling the story of the Gothic from the very beginning: from the fall of the Roman Empire and the Gothic tribes. It was well established before the Gothic novel emerged in 1764. The Gothic has been a term of cultural, social and political description for centuries.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Gothic literature books