Defining Characteristics of Gothic Literature

Posted on Nov 6, 2025 in Philology

Characteristics of the Gothic Genre

The 18th-century Gothic was a self-conscious revival of something older, though historical accuracy was of little importance.
The fascination for ruins and relics permeated all the Gothic arts.
In the range of forms available to Gothic writers, the ballad, dating back to an oral tradition, and the medieval romance were significant literary modes.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, these literary forms were discovered and re-created.

The word supernatural generally suggests something ghostly and unexplained.
On closer examination, it also has a deeper meaning: beyond or above the natural, rationally explainable world.
In this expanded sense, the supernatural is linked with another Gothic concept: the sublime.
Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was an influential treatise focusing on the human reaction to an overwhelming experience that transcends everyday normality.

The appeal of the Gothic has a psychological basis: a fundamental need in the individual psyche to experience something greater than normal, everyday consciousness.
Gothic texts are pioneering in their psychological emphasis, focusing not only on the sublime and the supernatural, but also on sexuality.
Sigmund Freud, in a paper titled “The Uncanny” (1919), explicitly acknowledged the appeal of the Gothic.

The words horror and Gothic seem to belong together, but horror does not have to be present in a Gothic text.
Horror needs to be distinguished from terror. This distinction was made by Ann Radcliffe in 1816, who stated that terror “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” whereas horror “contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.”

A number of possible settings exist for a Gothic story, although there are certain generic preferences: ruins, dungeons, and darkness.
Whatever the setting, some form of obscurity or mystery is a common feature.
In many Gothic texts, a ruin of some sort embodies the sense of mysterious obscurity and gives the novel a title, e.g., The Castle of Otranto.
The hero of Walpole’s novel is the castle itself.

Gothic novels often present the plot through multiple narrators, at times telling quite different stories. In Frankenstein, there is one novel, but within it several stories. In Dracula, there are more narrative viewpoints, all enhanced by the range of genres used: letters, journals, diaries, and newspaper articles.
As the Gothic tendency in literature developed, so too did the choices available to its practitioners. These include the following subgenres:
- The classic “Gothic horror” tale (e.g., Dracula)
- The historical romance (e.g., Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe)
- The American tradition of domestic Gothic fiction (e.g., Poe and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw)
- Fantasy fiction, as in the work of Tolkien
- Some science fiction and science fantasy texts (e.g., H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau)