DESCRIPTION
This presentation considers the relationships between Gothic and Romanticism between 1764 and 1818. It locates the Gothic within the literary heritage of the Graveyard Poets and the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first explicitly Gothic novel, is then considered as a reference point for later Gothic stylistics. The presentation concludes by considering the close of the First Phase of Gothic in 1818, not merely through Frankenstein – which had its origins in a meeting of Romantic poets at the Villa Diodati in 1816 – but also by way of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, which respectively satirised Gothic and Romantic sensibilities.
