Summary Gothic Timeline

Gothic Timeline
 Pre/Proto Gothic (1721-1763)
 Early Gothic (1764-1788)
 High Gothic (1789-1813)
 Late Gothic (1814-1838)
 early Victorian Gothic (1830s-1860s)
 mid Victorian Gothic (1840s-1870s)
 late Victorian (1870-1900)
 Modern Gothic (1900s)
 Post Modern Gothic (1970s)

Proto Gothic
 gloomy dark atmosphere
 places and spaces of death - graveyard poetry
 corruption of aristocracy – Shakespeare and Macbeth
 mixing of pleasure and terror – Burke’s Sublime
 ghosts, supernatural and curses
 past as distinct to modernity

Early Gothic
 established by 1764
 focus on aristocratic characters
 narrative stories developed with the novel format
 ambitious range of locations unlike Graveyard poetry - central/southern Europe even
Arabia
 trope of the consciously antiquated past - architecture, documents
 melodrama
 villains doing monstrous things but not necessarily monsters themselves

The Castle of Otranto 1764

 corrupt/sinister aristocrat - Manfred - focused on bloodline and lineage → seen in
Dracula and The Lady of the house of love
 desperate female ingénue - Isabella
 labyrinth castle - entrapment - symbols of aristocracy
 Theodore - helper - priest
 use of supernatural - suits of armour - symbols of past - statues and portraits
 medieval aesthetic - Romantics obsessed with medievalism

Other Early Gothic texts

 Vathek - Caliph, fustian pact
 The Recess - family secrets, secret romances
 Caliph goes around and conquers, Eastern, Colonial