![]() ![]() When it was first published in 1764, The Castle of Otranto claimed to be a translation of an Italian manuscript from 1529 that was telling a story originally written hundreds of years before that. What did he think he was doing? One thing he was surely trying to do was to perpetrate a good hoax. That idea-which goes against the grain of the assumption that the modern novel is all about realism-runs through books like Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and thousands more works of fiction, be they written as stories or novels, or filmed for cinema or television.īut of course Horace Walpole did not know that all of these works would follow from The Castle of Otranto he was not setting out to found what would become the first fully-fledged sub-genre of the English novel. Like the Gothic novels, plays, stories, and films that followed it, The Castle of Otranto teases us by suggesting that the rules of the everyday world do not always apply, that sometimes only a supernatural explanation can account for everything we see. ![]() ![]() Which is fair enough, so far as it goes Walpole’s novel did establish many key features of this genre, which has been popular with readers ever since The Castle of Otranto was first published on Christmas Eve, 1764. The Castle of Otranto is often referred to as the first Gothic novel. ![]()
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