The English Gothic Novel In The Castle Of Otranto

he social and cultural background of the genre gothic novel Cultural and (academic.edu (2009)), the English Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole 's The Castle of Otranto (1765), which was enormously popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon became a recognizable genre, (academic.edu (2009)) continued to state that, modern readers, saw, The Castle of Otranto as a dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid and flat; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense, despite the supernatural manifestations and a young maiden 's flight through dark vaults. The genre takes its name from Otranto 's medieval–or Gothic–setting; early Gothic novelists tended to set their novels in remote times like the Middle Ages and in remote places like Italy (Matthew Lewis 's The Monk, 1796) or the Middle East (William Beckford 's Vathek, 1786) (academic.edu (2009)). (academic.edu (2009)) continue to state some of the elements of a gothic novel which include: A castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not (the castle plays such a key role that it has been called the main character of the Gothic novel), Ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy, dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern houses, become spooky basements or attics, extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather, omens and ancestral curses, magic, supernatural manifestations,