In English literature, the architectural Gothic Revival and classical Romanticism gave rise to the Gothic novel, often dealing with dark themes in human nature against medieval backdrops and with elements of the supernatural.F. Botting, Gothic (CRC Press, 1996), pp. 1-2. Beginning with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, it also included Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), which helped found the modern horror genre.S. T. Joshi, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: an Encyclopedia of our Worst Nightmares (Greenwood, 2007), p. 250. This helped create the dark romanticism or American Gothic of authors like Edgar Allan Poe in works including "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842) and Nathanial Hawthorne in "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) and "The Birth-Mark" (1843).S. T. Joshi, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: an Encyclopedia of our Worst Nightmares, Volume 1 (Greenwood, 2007), p. 350. This in turn influenced American novelists like Herman Melville in works such as Moby-Dick (1851).A. L. Smith, American Gothic Fiction: an Introduction (Continuum, 2004), p. 79. Early Victorian Gothic novels included Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).D. David, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 186. The genre was revived and modernised toward the end of the century with works like Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).S. Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 111.
