Gothicism in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Bram Stoker’s Dracula: From ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Gothic

Abstract

This paper presents the Gothic world from different contexts. While early Gothic novels are about aristocratic villains and medieval settings, the ‘new’ Gothic is used to represent the modern context associated with the urban and industrial world. This paper explores the use of the Gothic genre in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); the novels which belong to two different centuries. Walpole’s Gothic differs from the ‘modern’ Gothic’ of Dickens and Stoker. Charles Dickens’s (1812-1870) and Bram Stoker’s(1847-1912) novels explore the interplay between the Gothic and the Victorian context. The contexts of these novels reveal the use of two types of Gothic genre: the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Gothic. The objective of this paper is to introduce the use of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Gothic in the three novels and the various sources of threats produced by this mode of literature. The following parts will be devoted to analyzing the Gothic settings, supernatural elements, and Gothic themes.