In which respects is "Frankenstein" a Gothic novel in close Reference to subject; theme; language and style?

This essay hasn't yet been marked by one of our teachers

You can view 13 essays on Mary Shelley that have been Marked by Teachers

The first 200 words of this essay...

In which respects is "Frankenstein" a Gothic novel in close

Reference to subject; theme; language and style?

Literary Gothicism is a type of imitation of medievalism launched in the later eighteenth century. Gothicism featured accounts of terrifying experiences in ancient castles - experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards etc. By extension, it came to designate the macabre, mysterious, fantastic, supernatural, and, again, the terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature more generally.

The Castle of Otranto (1764) is a very good example of Gothic literature, it is a short novel in which the ingredients are a haunted castle, a villain, mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, a moaning ancestral painting, a damsel in distress and violent emotions of terror, anguish and love. Frankenstein in this way doesn't fit in to the Gothic genre. Frankenstein is not set in the typical desolate settings that are distinctive in Gothic novels but are set in very human surroundings i.e. in the family hone, University of Ingelstadt. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein focuses more on the dangers of science and the reactions of people in extreme circumstances than of the mysteries of the supernatural.