Writers of the roman noir include François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Baculard d'Arnaud, and Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Albin, comtesse de Genlis. Jane Austen Northanger Abbey (written 1798) France and GermanyĪt about the same time, parallel Romantic literary movements developed in continental Europe: the roman noir ('black novel') in France and the Schauerroman ('shudder novel') in Germany. 'I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself.' The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again I remember finishing it in two days – my hair standing on end the whole time.' Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. Unlike Walpole, her novels, beginning with The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), were best-sellers-virtually everyone in English society was reading them. Among other elements, Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which later developed into the Byronic hero. It was Ann Radcliffe who created the gothic novel in its now-standard form. The basic plot created many other gothic staples, including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as countless trappings such as hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines.

Indeed, The Castle of Otranto was originally subtitled 'A Romance'-a literary form held by educated taste to be tawdry and unfit even for children, due to its superstitious elements-but Walpole revived some of the elements of the medieval romance in a new form. Thus was born the gothic novel's association with fake documentation to increase its effect. He originally claimed that the book was a real medieval romance he had discovered and republished. Walpole's novel arose out of this obsession with the medieval. For example, Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto is often regarded as the first true gothic romance, was obsessed with fake medieval gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a gothic revival fashion. It was a fascination with this architecture and its related art, poetry (see Graveyard Poets), and even landscape gardening that inspired the first wave of gothic novelists. The term 'gothic' came to be applied to the literary genre precisely because the genre dealt with such emotional extremes and dark themes, and because it found its most natural settings in the buildings of this style-castles, mansions, and monasteries, often remote, crumbling, and ruined. English Protestants often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic and superstitious rituals.

The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations-thus the urge to add fake ruins as eye catchers in English landscape parks. In a way similar to the gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the term 'gothic' became linked with an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrill of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. Gothic revival architecture, which became popular in the nineteenth century, was a reaction to the classical architecture that was a hallmark of the Age of Reason. The opprobrious term 'gothick' was embraced by the eighteenth-century proponents of the gothic revival, a forerunner of the Romantic genres. The term 'gothic' was originally a disparaging term applied to a style of medieval architecture (Gothic architecture) and art (Gothic art). Important ideas concerning and influencing the Gothic include: Anti-Catholicism, especially criticism of Catholic excesses such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain) romanticism of an ancient Medieval past melodrama and parody (including self-parody).

Victorian gothic literature