History Flashcards
Early gothic novels
Early Gothic Novels: Works like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) featured dark, foreboding settings and complex explorations of good versus evil.
19th century evolution
19th-Century Evolution: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) introduced a shift by portraying the villain as a product of human folly and scientific overreach. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, beginning with “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), condensed Gothic elements into shorter narratives.
Victorian era
Victorian Era: This period produced notable Gothic horror works such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). These stories often explored duality, repressed desires, and the supernatural.
20th century adaptations
20th-Century Adaptations: The genre transitioned into film, with early cinema adapting classic Gothic novels, notably Universal’s Dracula (1931). Modern Gothic tales shifted settings to contemporary locations, as seen in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), maintaining the genre’s signature atmosphere of unease and terror.
