SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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monster which lurks in the castle might easily be compared to the raging, incestuous
father, unrecognizable and terrifying in his excess of passion.
Horace Walpole is widely regarded as having created the first Gothic novel with
his 1764 The Castle of Otranto; in fact, the title page of the 2 nd edition amends the name
of the book to The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story. Walpole is likewise credited with
the first Gothic drama, The Mysterious Mother (1768). His works began the first wave of
the form, and dozens more Gothic novels—and plays—followed, including works by
Matthew Lewis (1796), Ann Radcliffe (1797), Sophia Lee (1783), and Charlotte Dacre
(1806). In a way Walpole acts as his own critic through his explication of plot, character,
and motivation in his preface to the second edition. Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe
acknowledge the importance of The Castle of Otranto to their own works. Edith
Birkhead’s 1921 The Tale of Terror and Montague Summers’s 1938 The Gothic Quest: A
History of the Gothic Novel were among the first to identify and survey works identified
as Gothic. As a literary form, Gothic was not always looked upon favorably and it was
not until the late twentieth century that it began to be studied in a serious fashion by
literary critics. David Punter’s 1980 The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic
Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day often serves for scholars as a useful introduction
to Gothic themes, reading early Gothic works through the lens of psychoanalytic
criticism; in doing so, he finds that the works reflect the deep social anxieties of their
times. The Castle of Otranto, for example, captures the tension aroused in Englishmen as
the nation moves out of the traditional past, often reluctantly, and into a new and
unfamiliar world. Fred Botting agrees in his critical survey, Gothic (1996), that “The