The Haunting of Hill House | Literary Precedents
The wealth of previous examples of Gothic ghost stories to which Jackson adds her novel reaches back to at least Roman times. Works such as The Castle of Otranto (Walpole; 1765), The Mysteries of Udotpho (Radcliffe; 1794), to some degree Frankenstein (Shelley; 1818) and Dracula (Stoker; 1897), and scores of others form the long tradition in which Jackson is writing.
As Carol Cleveland has perceptively shown, Jackson can be seen to be reversing the contemporary formula Gothic novel: in the formula Gothic, a beautiful heroine encounters a haunted mansion, but...
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