The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole (Black Letter Press)

Description

When Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, he defined the Gothic genre as it has come down to us today, as well as influencing the portrayal of the supernatural in English literature as a whole. As much an exercise in aesthetic taste as historical fiction, and inspired by the masterpiece of 18th-century Gothic Revival architecture he commissioned as his home at Strawberry Hill, few novels have so wide and deep a legacy, across so many media, not least in the conception of Hogwort’s.