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SOURCE: "Gothic Fathers: The Castle of Otranto, The Italian, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer," in Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence, Princeton University Press, 1980.
In the following excerpt from her Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence (1980), Wilt examines the religious import of Walpole's Gothic tale.
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) is a rather gormless tale for which Walpole claimed little, and even the claim he did make—"Terror, the author's principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing"1—is not entirely true. Its merits are not in character, plot, or prose, nor as he had thought, in the dramatic structure, but in half a dozen memorable tableaux,2 frozen moments of action, which are almost certainly lifted from Walpole's dreams, and maybe yours and mine too.
The narrative proper begins, like a primer in Gothic plot, with the father: "Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son...
This section contains 2,323 words (approx. 8 pages at 300 words per page) |
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