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What is the Gothic? | Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

As Nick Groom notes in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, “Type ‘Gothic’ into Google and you get over 250 million hits: images of ecclesiastical architecture, websites devoted to ‘bone-chilling’ literature, and opportunities to purchase alternative footwear…. Trying to identify the original ‘Goths’, meanwhile, can lead either to an ancient barbarian race or to a rock music subculture of the 1980s” (2012). All these things are, in fact, Gothic, a term with a varied yet related collection of meanings.

“Gothic” originally referenced tribes (Visigoths in the west, Ostrogoths in the east) most famous for invading Rome. The rise of the Goths is often considered the beginning of the “Dark Ages,” a misleading term for the period between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Stereotyped as a time of intellectual decline, the reality of the early Middle Ages was more complex: in fact, the Visigoths developed a code of law with comparatively progressive attitudes toward the rights of women and the practice of religion.

As Christianity spread across medieval Europe, cathedrals appeared across the continent in a style that sought to capture the magnificence of God for an illiterate public. This ornate, dramatic, and asymmetrical style of art and architecture, seen in the famous Notre Dame de Paris, was distinct from the symmetrical, ordered classical style exemplified by the Roman Pantheon. As the Renaissance aimed to revive classical ideals, Gothic acquired a new meaning: Giorgio Vasari deemed medieval architecture “Gothic,” meaning to debase the style as un-Roman and un-Enlightened. The name stuck, without its necessarily pejorative connotation. 

In The Gothic Cathedral, Otto Georg Von Simson writes that the defining features of Gothic architecture are not its feats of engineering — vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, flying buttresses — or its soaring height, but its “two aspects…without precedent and parallel: the use of light and the unique relationship between structure and appearance” (2020, [1989]). Through light and space, architects aimed, Von Simpson argues, to reflect God in stone:

The Gothic Cathedral

The cathedral was the house of God, this term understood not as a pale commonplace but as fearful reality. The Middle Ages lived in the presence of the supernatural, which impressed itself upon every aspect of human life. The sanctuary was the threshold to heaven. (1989, [2020])

Yet, there was a dark side to Gothic architecture in its shadowy corridors, depictions of hellish torment, and monstrous gargoyles leering overhead. The violence of the Reformation added another layer of less-than-heavenly associations with Gothic architecture: iconoclasts left Europe’s religious structures in ruins and the remains of Gothic architecture haunted.

In the 17th- and early 18th-centuries Gothicism was again transformed: the Goths were reimagined as forerunners to modern society, early Christians who stood against the excesses of paganism and provided an example for curtailing absolutist monarchies. Gothic ruins became popular sites to visit for poetic inspiration or historical reflection. Cultural fascination with medieval customs and architecture helped spark the Gothic literary tradition that emerged in the 1760s.

A naïve young woman finds herself in a vast and mysterious house, filled with unsavory secrets. A guilt-ridden monk is tormented by visions of past wrongs — are they dreams or spectors? A scientist labors in a candlelit laboratory as rain pounds against the window. These are recognizably Gothic scenes. But what makes them so?

The Gothic is, in many ways, a formula, a collection of plot devices, character types, and other tropes that can be rearranged and subverted to tell a story — and incorporated into works of any genre.

Here are some key Gothic elements and tropes: 

Since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), authors have loved setting Gothic stories in scary structures — castles, monasteries, cathedrals, and houses. Gothic spaces are often labyrinthine or difficult to navigate, containing secret passageways, shadowy corners, crumbling walls, forbidden rooms, and dramatic architectural features (staircases, towers, dungeons, crypts). Glance through the horror movies released in any given year, and you’ll soon notice that many stage their terrors in a single prominent location — whether that structure is haunted by undead presences (The Amityville Horror), terrorized by man-made horrors (Psycho, Get Out), or home to both (The Shining). 

The Gothic also frequents settings which are sublime. Edmund Burke uses sublime to describe intense feelings of pain and danger which can be pleasurable to us “at certain distances, and with certain modifications.” Sublime landscapes often force us to confront our smallness in the face of nature — high mountains, frozen tundras, deep oceans.

“It was a dark and stormy night….” Or, as Mary Shelley writes in Frankenstein (1818), “It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” The mood of the Gothic translates into its literal gloomy atmosphere, rife with rain, lightning, mist, wind, and fog. The cold, damp, and dark obscure the sun during the day, while pale moonlight lights the Gothic night. 

Take this passage from Jane Eyre (1847), when Jane is wandering alone after leaving Mr. Rochester,

Jane Eyre

I lay still a while: the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the skin. Could I but have stiffened to the still frost — the friendly numbness of death — it might have pelted on: I should not have felt it; but my yet living flesh shuddered to its chilling influence.

Here, the weather both reflects and creates the genre’s characteristic melancholy.

Gothic literature has spawned all sorts of nightmarish beings — vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons. These monsters come from nature (Godzilla), from the past (Dracula), from our own creation (Frankenstein’s creature), or from within (Dr. Jekyll’s evil counterpart, Mr. Hyde). Monsters are transgressors, refusing to play by the rules as they prey upon our fears and our desires. (See our study guide on monster theory for more.) 

Some works of Gothic literature feature a literal monster, while others depict humans who behave monstrously, including sadists, serial killers, and sexual predators. Gothic monsters help us interrogate the boundaries between human and nonhuman, acceptability and depravity, goodness and evil.

Things just don’t seem to stay dead in the Gothic. Ghosts haunt the genre, terrifying characters, possessing them, or warning them of danger. The genre explores the boundary between life and death through beings that transcend them, and ghosts also allow the gothic to emphasize that particular feeling that won’t let the past rest: guilt. 

The past always seems to return in the Gothic; wrongs demand to be righted, unsated figures seek revenge, and traumatic events resurface. These ghosts may not be literal, but they are felt: for example, in Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic romance, Rebecca (1938), the protagonist is tormented by comparisons between her and her husband’s late wife, Rebecca. The narrator feels Rebecca’s presence throughout the house and must deal with the consequences of her (and her husband’s) past actions. Even objects in the Gothic seem to have lives of their own; doors mysteriously slam shut and portraits watch from the walls.

Strange families are common in Gothic literature. Characters are haunted by the loss of significant family members or by wrongdoings which continue to curse the family line. Complex family trees allow for reveals of unknown relatives and inheritances. The Gothic wonders how much your family dictates who you are and how difficult it is to break from familial expectations. 

Incest is also a common Gothic trope; in Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Trangression, Jenny DiPlacidi argues that,

Gothic incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression

representations of incest are revealed as synonymous with the Gothic as a whole: complex, multifaceted and consciously resistant to the dominant social and sexual hegemonies in their models of alternative agencies, sexualities, forms of desire and family structures. (2018)

The Gothic loves damsels in distress: women in danger, pursued or held captive by monsters and monstrous men who threaten them with physical violence and sexual transgression. These Gothic heroines — beautiful, waifish, fragile — swoon and shriek in terror. 

Henry Fusili’s painting The Nightmare captures the dramatic distress of the Gothic heroine. A beautiful woman lies with a demon crouched on her torso. Her white dress hugs her body, and her long neck invites a kiss or a monster’s bite. The painting’s combination of horrific and seductive elements exemplifies the Gothic impulse to see beauty alongside and within pain, fear, and death.

While Gothic heroines may seem helpless and naïve, they often need to be clever and resourceful in order to save themselves. In Dracula (1897), Mina Harker is not just the vampire’s victim; she plays an integral role in defeating him, drawing upon her knowledge of the train tables and battling Dracula alongside the men.

Male Gothic protagonists are conflicted, solitary, tortured, brooding, and secretive. The “Byronic hero” — modeled after famous poet and infamous womanizer Lord Byron — rides the line between hero and villain, sometimes a darkly seductive charmer, sometimes a cold and sullen loner. The mercurial Mr. Rochester manipulates Jane even as he is tormented by his secret past; the melancholy Victor Frankenstein alternates between self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, racked with guilt from his actions and inaction.

Another version of this tortured type is the sympathetic monster — Frankenstein’s creature, the Phantom of the Opera, Edward Scissorhands. Rather than clinging to power while brooding on their bad actions, these figures are usually disempowered and tortured by their own existence more than anything they’ve done.

The heroine slowly walks down the hallway. Tense string music plays in the background, and she tightens her grip on the weapon in her hand as she moves in and out of shadow. The music swells, and you hold your breath as you wait for something to happen.  

This feeling of tension and suspense is core to the Gothic aesthetic. The genre plays with psychological intensity and anticipation as much as it releases into outbursts of violence.

The Gothic also embraces melodrama. Dramatic events occur and characters respond in kind — women swoon, men rage and lash out. Inner torment is expressed in displays of “madness,” and characters become physically ill as a result of moral failure, psychological distress, or bad weather. 

Doubling is another common trope in the Gothic. Some stories, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), feature doppelgangers, people who look exactly alike. But Gothic doubles can take other forms too — twins, reflections, separate characters who begin to merge into one. In Carmilla (1847), Laura and Carmilla grow more alike and codependent: “you and I are one for ever,” Carmilla declares.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dorian’s double is his decaying portrait which allows him to remain forever young. This doubling, as with Jekyll and Hyde, allows for an examination of the duplicity of man and the difference between appearances and true nature. 

In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes about her inspiration for the novel,

Frankenstein

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. (1831)

The book came to Shelley in a dream, fitting for a story which features powerful dreams of its own. Sleep is often disrupted in Gothic texts by visions and nightmares which reveal desires, fears, or dangers.

The Gothic is more than the sum of its parts: it is invested in particular themes which can be adapted to different times, locations, and political agendas. Broadly, the Gothic depicts transgressions, both of behavioral norms (sexual deviance, gender subversion, moral wrongdoings) and of seemingly fixed boundaries (self and other, life and death, past and present, man and monster). Dwelling often in the spaces between these categories, the Gothic often aims to evoke an ambivalent feeling of pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. Fear, the popularity of the Gothic seems to say, can feel pretty good. 

Theoretical concepts often helpful for analyzing Gothic texts include the unheimlich/uncanny (Freud), the abject (Kristeva), the grotesque, the liminal, the monstrous, the sublime (Burke), the fantastic (Todorov; Rabkin), the weird (Fisher), and the eerie (Fisher).

The Gothic novel pushes back against the Enlightenment’s view of the world as rational, disenchanted, and comprehensible through human experimentation and exploration. As William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith write in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic,

The Encyclopedia of the Gothic

The Gothic pursues a seemingly messier version of what it means to be a person than that articulated in early natural philosophies and suggests that the world is a more complex place than Enlightenment science would have us believe. However, this is, of course, a simplification. The Gothic represents an attempt not to destroy coherence but to provide an alternative context within which meaning is discussed. The Gothic is thus founded on a model idea of debate and interrogation and functions as a form of radical skepticism that, paradoxically, seems to echo the Enlightenment emphasis on interrogation and testing as a way of getting at some semblance of the truth.

Some of the earliest criticism on Gothic aesthetics was produced by the prolific Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. Building on Edmund Burke’s work, Radcliffe defined “terror” and “horror,” drawing a distinction between them — and the two emerging strains of Gothic novel. In the posthumously published essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), she writes that terror and horror are “so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (1826). 

Radcliffe champions terror, arguing that terror relies on an obscured or anticipated fear, something felt rather than faced, whereas horror results from the shock and awe of confronting something ghastly. Terror is evoked when the image is “not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excite the imagination to complete the rest…. Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate” (1826). This distinction between terror and horror remains a method for analyzing the Gothic and continues to be reinterpreted by Gothic scholars. (See Locating Ann Radcliffe for more on Radcliffe’s writing and aesthetics.)

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is traditionally considered the first Gothic novel, in part because Walpole added the subtitle “A Gothic Story” to its second edition. Originally presented as a translation of a lost 16th-century manuscript, the novel takes place in a medieval Italian castle, reflecting the period’s fascination with a mysterious and romanticized Gothic past. Otranto established many elements that became characteristic of the Gothic: elaborate and eerie architecture, a gloomy atmosphere, a vengeful past, seemingly supernatural events, religious imagery, disguised identities, and — of course — the dead and undead. As Annie Pécastaings writes in her introduction to Otranto, “The character types who inhabit Otranto’s landscape have become staples of the Gothic novel: Isabella (Frederic’s daughter) is the novel’s maiden in distress, Manfred its lustful villain, and Father Jerome its mysterious holy monk” (2009).

In the decades following the publication of Otranto, the Gothic novel flourished in books like William Beckford’s licentious, Orientalist tale, Vathek (1786); Matthew Lewis’ moralist romance The Monk (1796); Ann Radcliffe’s popular, pioneering novels including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797); and Mary Shelley’s masterpiece and progenitor of science fiction, Frankenstein (1818).

By 1803, the Gothic novel had become so popular and recognizable that Jane Austen completed wrote a parody of the genre, Northanger Abbey (although the novel was not published until 1817). Charles Maturin’s meandering Melmouth, The Wander (1820) was once considered the bookend to the period of the proper Gothic novel, but this strict periodization quickly falls apart. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and her sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847) contain many Gothic elements, and some of the Gothic’s most famous creations arise much later in the century — J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), 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). While these later works were once considered revivals of an earlier mode or simply not Gothic, Gothic criticism now tracks a longer tradition across several cross-pollinating periods of development.

In the Victorian era, Gothic subgenres like the detective story, ghost story, and adventure story took shape, along with urban Gothic stories of London and the “suburban Gothic” of sensation fiction. Jarlath Killeen writes in History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914: 

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914

Just as the development of urban Gothic shows how modernity is considered to produce horrors of its own not reducible to the anachronistic or to history, so the suburban thrills of Sensation Fiction demonstrate categorically that, far from bringing enlightenment, modernity produces monsters. (2009)

Toward the fin de siècle and early twentieth century, the Gothic became a useful mode for addressing fears arising from a modernizing, secularizing, overextended British empire. (See our study guide on the fin de siècle for more on this period.)

The twentieth century provided plenty of new fears for the Gothic to tap into. In History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic, Lucie Armitt writes that the “real-life horror of two world wars takes over from the imagined horrors of the supernatural and/or superstition” (2011). Threats of nuclear war, serial killers, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic sparked their own Gothic interpretations, and the haunted house, an element of the Gothic since Walpole’s castle, rose to particular prominence, whether representing the destruction of war in Europe or American suburbia. Armitt argues that the twentieth century oriented the Gothic toward “threats we believe face our children,” evidenced by “the monster narratives the media constructs around ‘the paedophile’, ‘the child abductor’, ‘the child murderer’, ‘the child abuser’” (2011). 

The development of cinema brought Gothic to the silver screen; the 1930s and 1940s created a group of classic monsters — Boris Karloff as the creature in Frankenstein (1931), Bela Lugosi as the titular Dracula (1931), Henry Hull as a Werewolf of London (1935) — and, over the course of the century, Alfred Hitchock pioneered the visual Gothic. The 1960s through 1980s welcomed a proliferation of horror films and franchises, while more recently the Gothic has been shaped by the paranormal romance craze from Ann Rice to Stephanie Meyer.

As the Gothic expands, so does its definition and the scholarship around it. Armitt writes:

History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic

Unlike the origins of Gothic, which clustered around a specific, but small, group of writers, thinkers and painters…, twentieth-century reignition of interest in the contemporary Gothic has us reeling in terms of how best to tame this amorphous and ever-expanding ‘monster’. (2011)

The Gothic tradition is still alive and well, and it reaches far beyond the traditional novel, if it was ever confined there in the first place. Samuel Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” (1816), Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823), and Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and short stories infuse non-novelistic forms with Gothic tropes and themes. Today, the Gothic can be found in video games and tv shows, music and graphic novels. In addition to growing literature on Gothic subgenres — Rural Gothic, New Urban Gothic, Postfeminist Gothic —  there is increasing scholarship on regional Gothic traditions across the globe — Nordic Gothic, Irish Gothic, Australian Gothic, South Asian Gothic, South African Gothic. While the Gothic relies on recognizable conventions, it endlessly adapts to new locations, mediums, and monsters.

Like “Gothic,” “horror” as a genre signifier is difficult to define. While “horror” may at first bring to mind popular film franchises like Halloween and Scream, Darryl Jones points out that horror is not necessarily modern or low brow. He argues that tragedy is highbrow horror; images from Sophocles and Euripides (Oedipus gouging out his own eyes, Pentheus’ mother tearing her son apart, Medea murdering her children) would be right at home in the latest splatter film.

While horror and the Gothic are certainly related — today’s horror literature can be traced back to the Gothic novel — the exact relationship between Gothic and horror as genres is contested. Jones files horror under the umbrella of the Gothic; whereas other kinds of Gothic texts can prioritize “terror” (as Radcliffe defined it), fears that remain obscured, imagined, or psychological, “horror” is a specific mode of the Gothic invested in, well, horror — in bodily/corporeal fear and revulsion. 

In Haunted Seasons, Derek Johnston takes the inverse approach, seeing the Gothic as a subgenre of horror — though defining these terms is especially difficult given that the label “Gothic” is so often applied by scholars after the fact rather than arising in original discourses around the texts. Johnston writes,

Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween

As a genre, horror is one that is regularly left undefined, presumably with the assumption that people know it when they see it…. The Gothic, on the other hand, is subject to many definitions, even when simply considering literary and media Gothic rather than, say, the architectural, the musical, or the subcultural. (2015)

In film criticism, the distinction between terror and horror can be helpful for categorizing films as Gothic or horror, categories that may borrow from each other but are ultimately separate — the subtle and suggestive Gothic hinting at partially visible terrors, dwelling in shadows, psychological manifestations, and hauntings. Horror, on the other hand, is often seen as heavily graphic and explicit, employing (often gratuitous) gore and violence. 

As helpful as this division can be, Xavier Aldana Reyes writes in Gothic Cinema that “the alignment of the cinematic Gothic with the horrifically acceptable or less extreme runs the risk of stigmatising more transgressive films and of denying horror (as it is understood in this taxonomy) its own potential value as more than a collection of gruesome moments” (2019).  Moreover, not all non-visceral horror films are Gothic: Reyes cites Alien (1979), which “does not rely on particularly visceral numbers to generate its scares and its monster stays out of focus for most of the film” but can be “described as science fiction horror” or else risk stretching the Gothic until it loses meaning (2019). Conversely, horror has no monopoly on blood, sex, and violence; the Gothic, too, can be graphic. 

The case study below details how the Gothic and horror operate alongside one another in cinema, combining “terror” and “horror” to craft a thrilling film.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak engages with the Gothic tradition, both celebrating and subverting the genre while incorporating elements of horror. The film is self-aware in its deployment of Gothic tropes; its title card is the cover of a book, which opens to let the viewer inside, intentionally locating the film as part of a literary lineage. 

Crimson Peak follows the American heiress Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) as she marries the mysterious English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and moves to his English estate, Allerdale Hall — nicknamed “Crimson Peak” because of the warm red clay which seeps up through the snow in winter.

The film borrows its core elements from the Gothic romance (think Rebecca [1938] and its predecessor, Jane Eyre [1847]) — a young woman suddenly attached to a man she doesn’t really know, a gloomy manor house with forbidden rooms, a cold and hostile housekeeper  the haunting presence (literal or metaphorical) of a past wife (or wives), an investigation into the man’s secrets. Crimson Peak mirrors themes of early Gothic novels by featuring familial strife, sexual transgression (including incest), and a young woman preyed upon for her money; it also draws upon the Victorian Gothic, incorporating a detective story and modernizing technology (Thomas’s clay mining machine, wax phonographic cylinders, glass plate photography). 

The Gothic decadence of Crimson Peak — the heroine walking slowly through the halls of a crumbling mansion with a candelabra in hand, her white nightgown trailing behind her and a ghostly portent ringing in her ears — is punctuated by bloody moments of horror.

The above  scene begins firmly in the realm of the Gothic: Edith dreams of wandering  sparse moorland , and a ghostly figure points in the direction she should go. Edith awakens and coughs, leaving a red stain on her white pillowcase and pale fingertips (the contrast of colors is a Gothic element particularly well-suited to film). Standing as she senses an otherworldly presence, she raises the candelabra to light the dim room and extends her hand, inviting the ghost to touch her. A shadow moves across the background, momentary and incorporeal. Her breath comes heavy and her eyes dart around as the scene builds its Gothic tension. Suddenly, Edith’s hand is pulled to the floor by an unseen force, and someone screams in the bathroom. The threats are sensed but still not clearly seen. Edith’s face is cast in shadow and  her body is framed by the crack in the door as we watch her slowly move through it and into the bathroom. There, she finds a ghost resting in the bathtub, a meat cleaver lodged in its skull. This image is one of horror: the massive weapon, the deformed body, the bloody red. Edith runs into the hallway and encounters another horrifying specter, the floor below it wet and shining with blood, its bones crunching as it lurches toward her.

Crimson Peak employs elements of the Gothic and horror to craft a film both suspenseful and visceral. Xavier Aldana Reyes notes that,

Gothic Cinema

one of Crimson Peak’s distinguishing features is its clay-red ghosts, halfway between the ethereal and the gory, and the aggressive nature of scenes like the face-stabbing of Thomas. (2019)

Its particularly violent ending delivers the viscerality of horror within the Gothic aesthetic, the white snow stained red with clay and blood. The film plays with shadow, color, and framing, honoring a history of Gothic aesthetics on screen whilst taking them in new directions. Through Crimson Peak, we see how the Gothic and horror are intertwined and how tropes of both can be continuously combined, reorganized, and subverted to tell compelling and frightening stories on page and screen alike.   

One method of analyzing and categorizing Gothic literature is by separating it into two traditions, “male” and “female” Gothic, often represented by the respective writings of Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. This division in part aligns with the distinction Radcliffe offered between horror and terror — the male Gothic tending toward shocking sights, the female Gothic preferring obscured or anticipated fears.

The distinction between male and female Gothic is also a difference in perspective: the male Gothic inhabits the psychology of the villain, or at least a flawed and tortured leading figure, while the female Gothic (first coined by Ellen Moers) focuses its lens on the persecuted protagonist — often a young woman — and the domestic space she risks entrapment within.

As Carol Davison writes in History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824, the male Gothic subverted Enlightenment ideals and patriarchal institutions through scenes of horrific depravity and interruptions of the supernatural, while the female Gothic “often rendered the violation of such ideals in veiled, sexualized terms, in keeping with the nature of the threats experienced by women” — threats that were not supernatural but manmade (2009). The female Gothic’s proclivity for disturbed domestic spaces contains a critique of the institutions women writers found themselves disregarded by and incarcerated within. Davison writes, “The Female Gothic castle/house … mirrors woman’s ‘ambivalent experience of entrapment and longing for protection’ within these institutions” (2009).

While meaningful scholarship has arisen out of an interest in the “female Gothic,” the term is a contested one. Is the female Gothic necessarily feminist, or is “feminist Gothic” another subgenre? Is the female Gothic necessarily by or about women? What about women who write Gothic stories that mainly feature men, or feature women in ways that do not resemble the typical “female Gothic” — and men who writes stories that do? Does the term emphasize the ways that women’s writers use the Gothic to highlight their particular experiences and concerns, or does it risk gender essentializing and implying that women can only write Gothic stories about domestic fears? In The Female Gothic: New Directions, Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith interrogate the term for the 21st-century, addressing how the female Gothic is shaped by, challenges, and complicates issues of national identity, sexuality, language, race, and history. As new writers “transform and renew the form,” they write:

The Female Gothic: New Directions

we need to retain a sense of history, of the line which runs from even further back than Radcliffe …  down to Toni Morrison and to the new ‘postfeminist Gothic’ of Buffy and her peers. Retaining the term ‘Female Gothic’ as a broad and fluid category – while both interrogating it and acknowledging its many mutations (feminist Gothic, lesbian Gothic, comic Gothic, postfeminist Gothic) – is one way of doing this. (2009)

Gothic politics: conservative or radical? 

Although the Gothic persistently explores what happens when boundaries are transgressed, it is not necessarily transgressive as a genre. The Gothic can deliver messages both conservative and progressive, oppressive and liberatory. At once, the genre allows the writer and reader to indulge in “deviant” desires while often condemning, or, at least, containing, them. 

J. Sheridan Le Fanu spends most of Carmilla (1872) exploring Laura’s simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion toward the alluring Carmilla. The author permits the reader to experience an otherwise unacceptable homoerotic connection between two young women. Of course, the “threat” must eventually be expelled: Carmilla is killed, heteronormativity reasserted as the rightful norm. But the book, like many Gothic texts, is ambivalent: Laura remains infatuated with Carmilla even after her death.

Gothic villains, particularly those of the supernatural variety, are often threats to the normative institutions. Dracula is an outsider, a foreigner from “the East”, who threatens the establishment and promises to proliferate until Protestant England has been overrun with his kind. Stoker’s text is rife with racist, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic tropes, and Dracula bristles Victorian norms with his seductive power, polygamy, and gender transgression. He is a composite representation of the fears faced by the British Empire at the fin de siècle.

Yet, in its aim to depict the transgressive, hidden, and repressed, the Gothic has always held radical potential. Early Gothic villains included people in positions of power, such as hypocritical clergymen or violent family patriarchs, inviting critique of the institutions they represented. Modern writers like Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Jewelle Gomez, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Wintersson, Carmen Maria Machado, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Stephen Graham Jones embrace the possibilities of the Gothic to tell complex stories that resist hegemonic narratives. 

Disabled artist Riva Lehrer in Golem Girl: A Memoir and trans theorist Susan Stryker in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” identify with Frankenstein’s creature, reframing conversations from the point of view of the “monster.” In response to transphobic comments, Stryker says:

The Transgender Studies Reader Remix

When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I find no more reason to mourn my opposition to them—or to the order they claim to represent—than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity to the human race. I do not fall from the grace of their company—I roar gleefully away from it like a Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell. (2022)

While the Gothic can condemn the monstrous, the transgressive, the inexplicable, it can also echo Stryker’s words: “I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself” (2022).

Additional Gothic Literature & Film Resources on Perlego

Key Concepts in the Gothic by William Hughes

The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy

Queer Others in Gothic Fiction: Transgressing Monstrosity by Ardel Haefele-Thomas

Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic by Sarah Gilbreath Ford

Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic by Catherine Spooner

Amitt, L. (2011). History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic. University of Wales Press. 

Austen, J. (1817; 2009). Northanger Abbey. Barnes & Noble.

Burke, E. (1757; 2009). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Routledge.

Davison, C. (2009). History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824. University of Wales Press.

Groce, J. (2014). An Introduction to Gothic Architecture. University Press.

Groom, N. (2015). The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Hughes, W., Punter, D., & Smith A. (2015). The Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Wiley-Blackwell.

History.com editors. “Goths and Visigoths.” History.com, 2019. Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/goths-and-visigoths 

Johnston, D. (2015). Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween. Palgrave Macmillan.

Jones, D. (2021). Horror: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Killeen, J. (2009). History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914. University of Wales Press.

Le Fanu, J.S. (1872; 2013). Carmilla, ed. Costello-Sullivan, K. Syracuse University Press. 

Lloyd-Smith, A. (2002). American Gothic Fiction. Continuum.

Moers, E. (1978). Literary Women. Women’s Press.

Moscicki, O. “Imagining a ‘gothic disability’: literary genre, political theory, and living disabled in Riva Lehrer’s portraiture,” Disability & Society, 2022.

Radcliffe, A. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Gothic Digital Series @ UFSC, 2017.

Smith, A. & Bennet, M. (2020). Locating Anne Radcliffe. Routledge.

Stoker, B. (1897; 2012). Dracula. William Collins.

Stryker, S. & Blackston, D.M. (2022). The Transgender Studies Reader Remix. Routledge.

Wallace, D. & Smith, A. (2009). The Female Gothic: New Directions. Palgrave Macmillan.

Walpole, H. (1764; 2009). The Castle of Otranto. Barnes & Noble.

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What is Speculative Fiction? | Definition, Examples & Analysis

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

When Shakespeare extols the virtues of the creative imagination here, he is also celebrating speculative fiction — as they are closely related. The history of speculative fiction, in fact, is as long as the history of the human imagination itself. From traditional folk tales to Star Wars, and ancient myths to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), we have long been entranced by visions of the extraordinary. Speculative fiction refers to fiction which looks beyond our own reality to speculate on different worlds — sometimes a new vision of our own world, and sometimes an entirely new world and mode of being altogether. These different worlds can take many forms, and encompass many storytelling traditions. The central question that animates these speculative visions is “what if?” What if dragons and magic existed? What if time travel was possible? What if we lived forever? What if history happened differently? What if we lived in a totalitarian society? What if there was a nuclear apocalypse? 

As a dedicated term, speculative fiction emerged in the mid-twentieth century, but it has not always had the same meaning. As Marek Oziewicz explains, 

The term “speculative fiction” has three historically located meanings: a subgenre of science fiction that deals with human rather than technological problems, a genre distinct from and opposite to science fiction in its exclusive focus on possible futures, and a super category for all genres that deliberately depart from imitating “consensus reality” of everyday experience. (“Speculative fiction,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2017)

With the historical prejudice against science fiction (with many critics considering it a less worthy genre), some writers were attracted to the “possible futures” definition of speculative fiction due to its clear distinction from science fiction. (Other science fiction writers may object, of course, that some of the more “out-there” science fiction ideas are also a perfectly possible future.) Margaret Atwood is one contemporary writer who favors this more restrictive definition of speculative fiction for her own work, such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985):

Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction

The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid’s Tale is a slight twist on the society we have now. (Atwood, quoted by Gina Wisker in Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction, 2011)

This version of speculative fiction is moored in our present understanding of reality; concerned with building future visions by rearranging the blocks of our own world. There is a lot of crossover with dystopian fiction here — The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, portrays an ultra-patriarchal, totalitarian future.

With such alternative conceptions in mind, however, speculative fiction has now come to be understood as the “super category” which Oziewicz outlines here: 

speculative fiction in its most recent understanding is a fuzzy set super category that houses all non-mimetic genres—genres that in one way or another depart from imitating consensus reality—from fantasy, science fiction, and horror to their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres, including the gothic, dystopia, zombie, vampire and post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, weird fiction, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, retold or fractured fairy tales, and many more. (2017)

Speculative fiction is now an extremely broad label, then. In essence, it can be applied to any form of fiction which departs, in any way, from the accepted rules of our own world. Many writers and creators identify their work as an example of speculative fiction precisely because of its broad definition, as they resist being pigeonholed into a more restrictive genre. In Gary K. Wolfe’s view, 

Out of This World

speculative fiction has been useful precisely because it allows the blurring of boundaries, which in turn permits a greater auctorial freedom from genre constraints and rules. (Wolfe, quoted by Rachael S. Cordasco in Out of This World, 2021)

Although critical appraisal is often focused on literature, speculative fiction also encompasses other modes of storytelling: such as comics/graphic novels, TV, film, theater, and video games. In the following sections, we will delve deeper into the what and why of speculative fiction.  

So why speculate about other worlds, other realities? Why not create stories about our own reality? The question could equally be phrased as: why do we like magic, awe, and wonder? 

Speculative fiction has no limits. It is the human imagination unconstrained; free to transport us beyond our everyday lives and reality into other worlds, modes of being, and thought. This speculative imagination also has a real-world impact; allowing us to look at our reality with fresh eyes, and imagine alternatives. Its impact is also important in terms of providing consolation, inspiration, education, entertainment, meaning, and more. Storytelling is central to humanity, and a great appeal of stories is their ability to transport us. 

Speculative fiction allows us to expand our imagination into other worlds, both for their own sake and for the new perspectives they may provide of our own world. It is often powerfully employed as a prism through which we can assess the troubling aspects of existing societies: whether it’s with the treatment of the environment, ethnic minorities, women, or LGBTQIA+ people — and more. Just some of the speculative fiction in this vein includes:

Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which explores the societal effects of sex and gender through an ambisexual alien race.

Okja (Bong Joon Ho, 2017), which gives us a new perspective on animal rights through the story of a young girl and a genetically modified “super pig.”

George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 (1949) has become almost synonymous with the concept of a totalitarian surveillance state. V for Vendetta (1982–89), by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, is another influential portrayal of speculative totalitarianism — with its Guy Fawkes mask being adopted as an anti-establishment symbol in a variety of movements. 

With its limitless parameters, speculative fiction can be a powerful space for self-expression for both authors and readers alike. Breaking free of prevailing societal norms, speculative fiction frees the imagination and provides room for new (or previously repressed) identities to take wing. 

Octavia E. Butler’s highly successful career is an intriguing example of this. As an African-American woman writing in a society (and industry) dominated by white men, Butler found speculative fiction to be an empowering space. As fellow speculative fiction writer Eugen Bacon argues, 

Writing Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction has over decades equipped authors like Octavia Butler with the foundations to cultivate inclusive worlds and characters. In speculative fiction Butler discovered a place and a voice to write ‘herself in’ because novels and short stories of her time in a male-dominated world of genre fiction did not feature an ‘other’ like her. (2019)

Through speculative fiction, writers such as Butler can express the marginalized experience and criticize the social hierarchies of our own world. In Gerry Canavan’s words,

Octavia E. Butler

[Butler] proved that the speculations of science fiction could no longer afford to ignore the fraught questions of identity and difference that have transformed global society across all levels in the postwar period. [...] The future never belonged to just one tiny fraction of the human race. (2016)

Another example of speculative fiction in this mold is found with Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series (2001–21), which imagines an alternative history where racial dynamics of oppression are reversed. For more on this topic, you can read our guide on Afrofuturism — a term which describes the speculative reimagining of the past, present, and future through a Black cultural lens. 

Although speculative fiction portrays other worlds, then, it can provide new and deeply powerful ways of looking at our own. On fantasy fiction in particular, Ann Swinfen argues that

In Defence of Fantasy

modern fantasy, far from being the escapist literature which it is sometimes labelled, is a serious form of the modern novel, often characterized by notable literary merit, and concerned both with heightened awareness of the complex nature of primary reality and with the exploration beyond empirical experience into the transcendent reality, embodied in imaginative and spiritual otherworlds. (1984, [2019])

Fantasy fiction’s portrayal of other worlds, Swinfen writes, enables a “magical renewing and refreshment of our perceptions” which allows us to “view the primary world, dulled through familiarity, with newly wondering eyes” (1984, [2019]). Because Swinfen is writing in response to critics’ disdain for the fantasy genre, it is understandable that so much weight is given to its real-world impact and value. But many would also argue that such a dichotomy (between “escapist literature” and “literary merit”) does not actually have to be made — that speculative fiction’s ability to transport us to other worlds is valuable in and of itself, without the need to constantly refer back to our own world. 

Oziewicz argues, for example, that “speculative fiction emerges as a tool to dismantle the traditional Western cultural bias in favor of literature imitating reality, and as a quest for the recovery of the sense of awe and wonder” (2017). Speculative fiction’s ability to inspire such “awe and wonder” is one of its most valuable qualities, and key to its enduring appeal. 

Here we will explore some of the main genres and subgenres that are contained within the wider super genre of speculative fiction. As we will see, there are many debates around where (if at all) the line can be drawn between these genres, as there is a lot of crossover between them.

Fantasy and science fiction are the leading genres within speculative fiction, and many of the other subgenres we touch upon (such as alternate history) have been variously assigned to one, the other, or both at once. Others argue that these subgenres should be kept clearly distinct from the two titans of fantasy and science fiction (along with all the associations they have gathered over time), in order to provide the reader with a clearer idea of what to expect. One thing is clear, however: they are all examples of speculative fiction. 

Fantasy is arguably the most free-form genre within speculative fiction, as by definition it transgresses rules and expectations. In Fantasy and Mimesis (2014), Kathryn Hume provides the following definition:

Fantasy and Mimesis

Fantasy is any departure from consensus reality, an impulse native to literature and manifested in innumerable variations, from monster to metaphor. It includes transgressions of what one generally takes to be physical facts [...].

Due to its “fantastical” nature, fantasy can be a difficult genre to categorically pin down — the only limit is the human imagination. In Swinfen’s view, 

The essential ingredient of all fantasy is ‘the marvellous’, which will be regarded as anything outside the normal space-time continuum of the everyday world. [...] The marvellous element which lies at the heart of all fantasy is composed of what can never exist in the world of empirical experience. (1984, [2019])

As we have touched upon in the general discussion of speculative fiction above, fantasy fiction can technically be traced back to the very first stories created by humans. Human history is full of fantastical folklore, and fantasy fiction therefore belongs to a rich tradition. Although the Western literary canon is often hermetically sealed away from the fantasy genre, just a few of its many fantastical works include Homer’s The Odyssey (c. 8th century BCE), Beowulf (c. 700–1000), Dante’s The Divine Comedy (c. 1321), and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600).  

When it comes to discussing modern fantasy fiction, it is impossible not to mention the looming presence of J.R.R. Tolkien, who still seems to keep a watchful eye over the landscape like a benevolent version of his Eye of Sauron. Along with Tolkien’s other work, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) has had a huge influence on modern fantasy fiction — particularly the “high” (or “medieval”) fantasy subgenre, which is often concerned with an epic battle between good and evil. Tolkien created a rich, detailed mythology, supported by astonishing levels of worldbuilding. 

Medieval-inspired fantasy in the mold of The Lord of the Rings remains a key strand of fantasy fiction, with authors such as George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb finding widespread success. Tolkien-inspired fantasy has become a tradition of its own, spawning a huge number of successful works across a range of mediums — with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) being just one example from the world of video games. But the genre of fantasy fiction is not limited to this “high” or “medieval” fantasy subgenre. Just some of the other subgenres within fantasy fiction include:

Low fantasy and urban fantasy, where fantastical elements are present in a normal world. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon, 1997–2003) and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) are just two examples. 

Historical fantasy, where fantastical elements are incorporated into a setting which resembles real-world history. Notable examples include Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004) and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus (2011).

Science fantasy, which incorporates elements of both science fiction and fantasy. Star Wars is often placed in this category, due to its fantastical elements. 

As we’ve already mentioned, though, there are no truly clear-cut distinctions between the various genres of speculative fiction. In Out of This World, for example, Rachael S. Cordasco writes that fantasy can also “act as a vast umbrella term” for other subgenres such as “gothic fantasy, surrealism, magical realism, and the Weird” (2021). For more information, you can explore our dedicated study guides on these topics here:

Gothic Fiction - Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

Alongside fantasy, science fiction is undoubtedly the most influential genre of speculative fiction. Science fiction is usually understood as what could happen within certain scientific parameters — even if the parameters which govern our present understanding of the world are very different. If speculative fiction as a whole asks “what if?”, then fantasy asks “what if the impossible were true?” and science fiction asks “what if the possible were true?” Although science fiction usually portrays a new set of circumstances, which may differ from our present understanding of reality, these are generally (in theory) explainable in a material sense. While a dragon may be a magical creature in fantasy, science fiction may portray it as an extraterrestrial life form instead. The line between advanced science and magic is often blurred, however, with some of the more fantastical science fiction stories often grouped under “science fantasy” accordingly. As always, caveats apply: definitive genre definitions are often criticized, along with the concept of “genre” itself.

If we hope to cautiously identify science fiction in general, then, Cordasco explains:

Science fiction includes texts whose stories are based on agreed-upon scientific or historical premises and involve what Darko Suvin has called the “interaction of estrangement and cognition” in the face of a “novum” (new physical law, idea, and so forth). (2021)

Popular examples of such “novums” include space travel, time travel, and other new technologies, as well as extraterrestrial life and planets. 

When we come to assessing the origins of science fiction, there is much debate. Adam Roberts traces the beginnings of science fiction to the beginnings of science itself, and   highlights the significance of the Copernican revolution in the 17th century, where new ideas of Earth’s place in the cosmos initiated science fiction anxieties and fantasies:

The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

These issues—the anxieties generated by Copernicus’s undermining of our special place in the universe; questions of transcendence and atonement; and a sense of the purposiveness and profusion of cosmic life—still haunt sf. (Roberts, “The Copernican Revolution,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, 2009)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is often identified as the first science fiction novel, but Roberts points out that this chronology

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