What is gothic genre?
The term Gothic originally was applied to a tribe of Germanic barbarians during the dark ages and their now-extinct language, but eventually historians used it to refer to the gloomy and impressive style of medieval architecture common in Europe, hence “Gothic Castle” or “Gothic Architecture.” The term became associated with ghost stories and horror novels because early Gothic novels were often associated with the Middle Ages and with things “wild, bloody, and barbarous of long ago” as J. A. Cuddon puts it in his Dictionary of Literary Terms (381). Alternatively, the label gothic may have come about because Horace Walpole, one of the early writers, wrote his works in a faux medieval castle). The best known early example is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Later British writers in the Gothic tradition include “Monk” Lewis, Charles Maturin, William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley. American Gothic writers include Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Alla
