Tale of Horror

Tale of Horror. The History of the Gothic Novel
Abandoned houses, family curses, resurrecting corpses, and ominous doppelgängers—many motifs of modern horrors and video games originated in Gothic novels of the 18th-19th centuries. In her classic work, English researcher and philologist Edith Birkhead traces the development of the "tale of horror" from the architectural mystique of Horace Walpole, the intellectual suspense of Ann Radcliffe, and the existential dread of Mary Shelley to the neurotic nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe, linking the literature of fear with popular superstitions, Romanticism, and crises of European culture. "Tale of Horror," written in 1921, is the first large-scale study of the Gothic novel and an engaging guide to the world of literary nightmares, showing why stories about ghosts, dungeons, and the intrusion of the supernatural continue to frighten us to this day.