Gothic Fiction – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’

On Tuesday, we put together a brief plot summary of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, Edgar Allan Poe’s short but terrifying story about a prince who retreats to his castellated abbey with a thousand of his courtiers, to avoid the horrific and fast-acting plague known as the ‘Red Death’. You can read Poe’s story here. Now, it’s time for some words of analysis concerning this intriguing story which, like many of Poe’s best stories, seems to work on several levels.

First, there is the literary precedent for the basis of Poe’s story: the Italian writer Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century work The Decameron is about a group of noblemen and noblewomen who retreat to an abbey to flee the plague, or Black Death. All that’s changed in Poe’s basic setup is the colour of the plague, to the fictional ‘Red Death’. Interestingly,

Frankenstein, 200 Years On: Why Mary Shelley’s Novel Remains So Relevant

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revisits Mary Shelley’s misunderstood parable and founding text of science fiction

Frankenstein is one of a handful of nineteenth-century fictional creations that went truly global and became ingrained in the popular consciousness. Along with Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, Mary Shelley’s character has flown free of the text which spawned it: Frankenstein has become synonymous with biological experimentation, the creation of hybrid ‘monsters’, and the perils of playing God. The Oxford English Dictionary includes the prefix ‘Franken-’, used to denote nouns implying genetic modification, most famously ‘Frankenfoods’. The OED also records ‘Frankenstein’ itself, in extended use, as both a noun and a verb.

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Black Cat’ was first published in August 1843 in the Saturday Evening Post. It’s one of Poe’s shorter stories and one of his most disturbing, focusing on cruelty towards animals, murder, and guilt, and told by an unreliable narrator who’s rather difficult to like. You can read ‘The Black Cat’ here. Below we’ve offered some notes towards an analysis of this troubling but powerful tale.

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a Gothic novel in miniature. All of the elements of the Gothic novel are here: the subterranean secret, the Gothic space (scaled down from a full-blown castle to a single room), the gruesome crime – even the hovering between the supernatural and the psychological.

In just five pages, it’s as if Edgar Allan Poe has scaled down the eighteenth-century Gothic novel into a story of just a few thousand words. But what makes this story so unsettling?

The First Gothic Novel

The early Gothic novelists are an interesting lot. Matthew Lewis, known for his 1796 novel The Monk, wrote his will on a servant’s hat while dying on board a ship from Jamaica to the UK. William Beckford wrote the bestselling Gothic novel Vathek in French in 1782, with the English version being translated by a vicar four years later. … Read more