Gothic Horror: The Castle of Otranto & The Monk

In 1764, in the midst of the Age of Reason, Horace Walpole claimed to have found and translated an old Italian manuscript, The Castle of Otranto, infested with supernatural beings, mad and immoral aristocrats, superstitions and dark secrets. For all its strangeness, Walpole's work offered a literary model for a whole new genre that explored the darker side of reality, marked by visceral impulses and forbidden desires. Thirty-two years later, Matthew Gregory Lewis published The Monk, a story in which a host of legendary supernatural beings-the devil, the Wandering Jew, the Bleeding Nun-blend effortlessly into the historical narrative. Together, these two novels, with their emphasis on the potential reality of the unknown and the lingering shadow of a brutal, monster-ridden world of superstition and irrational fears, established the basis for modern horror fiction and many other subversive or speculative works that were developped over the following century, including classics such as Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or Dracula.

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