English writer and politician Horace Walpole was born on this day in 1717. He is best known for his Gothic novel "The Castle of Otranto." [Gothic fiction, which is largely known by the subgenre of Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance.]
This book initiated a literary genre which would become extremely popular in the later 18th and early 19th century, with authors such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe [The Mysteries of Udolpho], William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley [Frankenstein], Bram Stoker [Dracula], Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and George du Maurier.
The Castle of Otranto was the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction, and it established many of the plot devices that would become typical of the Gothic novel: secret passages, clanging trapdoors, pictures beginning to move, and doors closing by themselves.
See also History of the Terror Tale by Edith Birkhead 1921
For more go to 70 Penny Dreadfuls, Gothic Novels and Dime Novels on DVDrom
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