Gothic Literature | Foreword

These very useful Critical Companion volumes offer a wide range of historical accounts about, literary excerpts from, and critical interpretations of a long-standing mode of fiction-making that has come to be called "the Gothic." Though this label has most often been attached to "terrifying" or "horrific" pieces of prose fiction ever since Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (the founding text of this form, first published in 1764) added the subtitle A Gothic Story to its Second British Edition of 1765, the hyperbolic and haunting features of this highly popular, but often controversial, mode have proliferated across the last two-and-a-half centuries in an increasing array of forms: novels, prose "romances," plays, paintings, operas, short stories, narrative and lyric poems, "shilling shocker" tales, newspaper serials and crime-reports, motion pictures, television shows, comic books, "graphic" novels, and even video...