horror
horrorand fantasy have been with us, in one form or another, for as long as literature has existed. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ( 1818 ), Robert Louis Stevenson 's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ( 1886 ), and Bram Stoker's Dracula ( 1897 ) are landmarks in horror/fantasy, but then so, too, it could be argued, are certain plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe , and Webster . But the horror/fantasy tradition goes back further, to Beowulf , the most important poem in Old English, dating from the 10th cent., and indeed beyond to the bloody visions of Sophocles ( 496 – 406 BC ) and others. More directly influential on the horror/fantasy fiction of the 20th cent. was Romanticism and the Gothic , in particular Blake , Monk Lewis , Ludwig Tieck , Clemens Brentano , and of course the early masters of the macabre short story, Bierce , Le Fanu , Poe , M. R. James ...
[The entire page is 594 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
