Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, which became her most famous work that embodied Romanticism. Victor Frankenstein, the main character, is a romantic character because he represents the Romantic ideals of imagination and innovation. The feelings of Shelley’s characters often copy the state of nature around them.

Frankenstein, by English author Mary Shelley, tells the story of a monster created by a scientist and explores themes of life, death, and man versus nature.

Mary Shelley

The characteristics of Romanticism include a focus on individual emotions, enthusiasm about the grandeur of the natural world, and a celebration of creativity and the figure of the artist.

Shelley’s most pressing and obvious message is that science and technology can go to far. The ending is plain and simple, every person that Victor Frankenstein had cared about met a tragic end, including himself. This shows that we as beings in society should believe in the sanctity of human life.

One novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, exemplifies Shelley’s use of gothic and romantic conventions. Shelley uses romantic and gothic conventions in Frankenstein’s settings, characterizations, subject matter, and plot to achieve her artistic ends. This location is also Romantic because of its scenic nature.

Romanticism is sometimes characterized as the larger movement, of which the Gothic is a part, a subset, or variety. Gothic is often seen as the more popular genre; it’s also identified more typically with women, while Romanticism is identified with men.

Gothic elements include the following:

• Setting in a castle.
• An atmosphere of mystery and suspense.
• An ancient prophecy is connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present).
• Omens, portents, visions.
• Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events.
• High, even overwrought emotion.
• Women in distress.

This lesson covers the three main features of Gothic architecture: the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress. We then look at a slideshow of examples of the Gothic style around Europe.

Terror and Wonder: 10 key elements of Gothic literature

• Set in a haunted castle or house.
• A damsel in distress.
• An atmosphere of mystery and suspense.
• There is a ghost or monster.
• The weather is always awful.
• Dreaming/nightmares.
• Burdened male protagonist.
• Melodrama.

Most prominent in great cathedrals and churches, the Gothic architecture appealed to the emotions; a sense of greatness, of the sublime. Something to awe and fear. Its core elements became staples of Gothic fiction. Set in a labyrinth Medieval Italian castle, the tale is steeped in the supernatural, romance and murder.

Characteristics of the Gothic include: death and decay, haunted homes/castles, family curses, madness, powerful love/romance, ghosts, and vampires. The genre is said to have become popular in the late 18th century with the publication of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764.

Secrets and curses as well as supernatural events constitute fundamental elements of Gothic fiction. Gothic fiction better known as Gothic horror refers to a genre or mode of literature and film that blends fiction and horror, death, and at times romance. In this genre, an atmosphere of mystery and terror prevails.

Often, Gothic writers use melodrama or “high emotion” to convey a thought. This exaggerated, impassioned language helps convey the panic and terror inherent in many characters. Themes of madness and emotional distress were seen in many of the 20th century Gothic novels that depicted the condition of psychosis.

This genre is dark, eerie, and mysterious, often containing elements of terror, horror, and the macabre and the bizarre. Common themes and motifs of the Gothic include power, confinement, and isolation.

The name Edgar Allan Poe conjures images of madmen, murderers and mysterious women who return from the dead. Most famous for his narrative works such as The Raven and the Tell Tale Heart, Poe has been described as the father of Gothic literature.

Called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, such novels commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors.

Gothic fiction began as a sophisticated joke. Horace Walpole first applied the word ‘Gothic’ to a novel in the subtitle – ‘A Gothic Story’ – of The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764. Some readers were duly deceived by this fiction and aggrieved when it was revealed to be a modern ‘fake’.

Gothic horror stories are very popular. This is because: Gothic fiction plays with minds and allows readers to question reality. Many people like the atmospheric settings which invoke a sense of danger but also freedom.

The birth of Gothic was thought to have been influenced by political upheaval. Researchers linked its birth with the English Civil War and culminating in a Jacobite rebellion (1745) more recent to the first Gothic novel (1764).

Gothic originally meant “having to do with the Goths or their language,” but its meaning eventually came to encompass all the qualities associated with Germanic culture, especially the Germanic culture dominant during the medieval period after the fall of Rome.

Along with the Burgundians, Vandals and others they belong to the East Germanic group. Roman authors of late antiquity did not classify the Goths as Germani. In modern scholarship the Goths are sometimes referred to as being Germani.

Black is a preference among the members of the Goth scene, as well as in the Punk scene. However, black symbolizes many things, such as death, the night, and the unknown, which are common themes in Goth music, art and literature.

Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Gothic Christianity refers to the Christian religion of the Goths and sometimes the Gepids, Vandals, and Burgundians, who may have used the translation of the Bible into the Gothic language and shared common doctrines and practices.

Gothic religion was purely tribal, in which polytheism, nature worship, and ancestor worship were one and the same. We know that the Amali dynasty deified their ancestors, the Ansis (Aesir), and that the Tervingi opened battle with songs of praise for their ancestors.

For example, the Visigoths, like most Gothic tribes, gradually converted from German paganism to Christianity over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. However, they initially adopted the Arianist form of the religion, as opposed to the Nicean, or Catholic, form practiced by most of Rome.

Most goths become goths because they have been spurned by ‘normal’ society because the way they want to live their lives does not fit in with how most people are told to live theirs.

Goth humour Dressing up, dancing, hanging out with like-minded friends – Goths enjoy similar leisure activities to young (and not-so-young) people the world over.

Gothic

Although Goth culture embraces the occult, it is not considered a physically violent fringe but rather a style of sinister music and clothes that gives disaffected suburban teenagers a group with which they can identify.