O Castelo de Otranto

The Castle of Otranto -- A Gothic Story (1764), horror tale by Horace Walpole, published in 1765. The work is considered the first *Gothic novel* in the English language; its supernatural happenings and mysterious ambiance were widely emulated in the genre. Called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, such novels commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors. The vogue was initiated in England by Horace Walpole’s immensely successful Castle of Otranto (1765). His most respectable follower was Ann Radcliffe, whose Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Italian (1797) are among the best examples of the genre. A more sensational type of Gothic romance exploiting horror and violence flourished in Germany and was introduced to England by Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk (1796). Other landmarks of Gothic fiction are William Beckford’s Oriental romance Vathek (1786) and Charles Robert Maturin’s story of an Irish Faust, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The classic horror stories Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker, are in the Gothic tradition but introduce the existential nature of humankind as its definitive mystery and terror.

Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals.
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(*) Gothic novel -- European Romantic, pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries. [Written by The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica].
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https://global.britannica.com/topic/The-Castle-of-Otranto
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/gothic/
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/style-guide-gothic-revival/
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Traduções publicadas pelo Clube do Livro, 1943 - 1989:
http://www.academia.edu/14207827/Traduções_publicadas_pelo_Clube_do_Livro_1943_1989
http://www.revistas.usp.br/tradterm/article/view/49894

Ficção / Literatura Estrangeira / Horror