A study of man’s duality, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde vies with his Treasure Island (1883) for his most popular work. He wrote the piece while recovering from a hemorrhage, a nightmare having… Read More ›
Horror Novels
Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The story of the events that led Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein story is now almost as well known as the plot itself. The tale began to take shape in 1816 as a result of ghost-story-telling sessions held among… Read More ›
Analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Bram Stoker followed the lead set by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to write horror fiction. Such stories were enjoying a renewed prestige among the French, and Stevenson proved that modern… Read More ›
Gothicism in Literature
The term Gothicism in its literary meaning derives not from the Goths, an ancient Germanic tribe, but from the sense of Gothic as medieval. This literary movement may be seen as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and… Read More ›
Analysis of Bram Stoker’s The Squaw
An unseasonable short story that Bram Stoker wrote in 1893 for Holly Leaves (the Christmas number of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News), “The Squaw” is set in Nuremberg, a city that Stoker had visited in 1885. A self-regarding, unnamed… Read More ›
Horror Novels and Novelists
By the end of the nineteenth century, writers interested in exploring supernatural themes had abandoned the mode of gothic fiction pioneered by eighteenth century English novelist Horace Walpole. Walpole and his imitators had exploited such props as medieval ruins and… Read More ›
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