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Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, is acknowledged by many as the first gothic novel. It was the first of it’s kind and many of the conventions used by Walpole, which put it in a literary genre of it’s own, were continued by authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Many of these defining characteristics can be seen within the very first few pages of the text and for the purposes of this essay, to identify some of these conventions used and the relevance of this text to modernity I shall focus this analysis on the passage between pages twenty-four and twenty-six from the Oxford World’s Classics edition.

The gothic novel emerged during the late eighteenth century and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which emphasised rationality and reason, and the gothic, in many ways, acts in a way of shadowing the progress of modernity and as an opposition to modern enlightenment ideas with its lawless rebellion against unity and order. Rational therefore, is not a word which......

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Approximate Word Count: 984
Approximate Pages: 4 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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