Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

So-called “Gothic” romance came into being long after the Middle Ages, the tribes and the architecture of which are most associated, rightly or wrongly, with the racial term “Gothic.” The first work of prose narrative to call itself “a Gothic Story” (and then only in its second edition) was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, first published in England in 1764 as supposedly a recent translation by the Anglican “William Marshall” of an Italian and Catholic text of 1529 printed “in the black letter” (a Gothic, as opposed to a roman typeface) that itself supposedly retold a story set and composed “between 1095, the aera of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last” (Walpole 1996: 5). When Walpole revealed the several ruses behind all this in the 1765 reprinting, he not only added the “Gothic” label – a word by then loaded with several contradictory meanings, as we shall see – but helped define it in a new preface that proposed his work as the avatar of a new kind of “romance” (as he put it himself) that partly embraced and partly rejected the medieval-chivalric, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century French traditions of romans that Walpole knew from his extensive reading and antiquarian collecting. Given that the mainly aristocratic romance of quests, long separated lovers, recovered nobility, and occasionally divine intervention had by now given way for the increasingly ... log in or subscribe to read full text