The Oxford Companion to English Literature | horror
horror
and 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]
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