Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Stephen Curtis

  See also: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Eighteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Shakespearean Horrors; Part Three, Reference Entries: Devils and Demons; Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Clark, Stuart. 1999. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Middleton, Thomas. [ca. 1606] 1988. The Revenger’s Tragedy. In Five Plays, edited by Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, 71–160. Houndsworth: Penguin.

  Sage, Victor. 1988. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. London: Macmillan.

  Shakespeare in Love. 1998. Directed by John Madden. Universal Studios.

  Simkin, Stevie. 2006. Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Walter, Brenda S. Gardenour. 2015. Our Old Monsters: Witches, Werewolves and Vampires from Medieval Theology to Horror Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Webster, John. [ca. 1614] 1996. The Duchess of Malfi. In The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, edited by René Weis, 103–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  HORROR IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  The roots of horror literature run back through the Middle Ages, the classical age of the ancient world, and beyond, to the fireside stories and cave paintings of our Paleolithic ancestors. And while “horror fiction” would not be used as a generic label until the mid-twentieth century, there is nevertheless ample justification for stating that it was in the eighteenth century that horror as a popular fictional genre emerged. During the last decade of this century—roughly contemporaneously with the French Revolution—that crucial precursor to modern horror, the Gothic novel, became among the most widely consumed literary forms.

  A wide variety of literary developments earlier in the century fed into the Gothic and the development of horror as a genre. Indeed, most early eighteenth-century writings that focused on the supernatural as a source of fear and excitement were not conceived as fiction at all. In reaction to the loss of religious faith occasioned by the rise of skeptical philosophy, empirical science, and materialism, the closing decades of the seventeenth century saw the publication of a variety of books and pamphlets dedicated to persuading their readers of the reality of supernatural beings, including ghosts, revenants, and demons. Later termed “apparition narratives,” such texts sought to combat growing skepticism toward religious, and specifically Christian, teachings, using supposedly empirical accounts of supernatural beings and occurrences to defend the reality revealed by scripture against the encroachments of Enlightenment science and philosophy.

  Probably the most influential of these was Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). Written by English cleric Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) and published shortly after his death, the book is a compendium of witchcraft and related subjects that is ultimately a defense of the truth of Christian scripture. As suggested by the title, which can be translated as “The Triumph over Sadducism”—with the latter term coming from the ancient Jewish sect of the Sadducees, which held a skeptical viewpoint about supernatural matters such as angels and the afterlife—Glanvill aligns skepticism toward supernatural menaces including witches and revenants with skepticism toward the Bible. Heavily influenced by Glanvill, American Puritan theologian and prolific writer Cotton Mather (1663–1728) published his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) shortly after the conclusion of the Salem witch trials. A work of natural theology that catalogues a wide variety of supernatural phenomena in the New World, Wonders focuses particularly on the dangers of witchcraft and the need to punish and prevent its practice, drawing on the cases presented during the Salem trials and serving as a justification for the trials themselves. Tremendously influential at the time of their publication, in the succeeding two centuries both Glanvill’s and Mather’s works would continue to exert an influence quite unlike anything their authors had intended, as they would be drawn upon by many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers who would reweave these accounts into fictional fabrics.

  Many eighteenth-century writers speculated about the attraction such supernatural terrors held, often tying them both to the important role folklore and superstition played in the development of national and cultural identities, and to the supposedly more universal concept of the sublime. An affective state combining awe and terror, the sublime became a major aesthetic category in Britain and throughout Western Europe following the rediscovery of the ancient Greek rhetorician Longinus’s Peri Hypsous and its translation into modern languages. (Nicholas Boileau’s 1674 French translation was probably the most influential, but the most widely read in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century was William Smith’s 1739 translation, titled On the Sublime.) Longinus saw the elicitation of great passion, ekstasis, as both the hallmark of genius in a writer and as a way of elevating the reader, and this concept of the sublime became widely discussed by critics and philosophers, and even more widely aspired to by writers and artists. English dramatist and critic John Dennis (1658–1734) explained the importance of sublime terror in poetry and theater in his 1704 essay “Grounds of Criticism in Poetry,” claiming that no passion is more “capable of giving a great spirit to poetry” than the “enthusiastic terror” of the sublime (Dennis 2000, 101). Dennis went on to iterate some sources of such terror in what amounts to an ingredients list for later Gothic writers: “gods, demons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcraft, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine, etc.” (102). Dennis concluded that such terrors are important both morally and theologically, as “of these ideas none are so terrible as those which show the wrath and vengeance of an angry god” (102). Building on Dennis’s ideas, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) provided a more psychological account of sublime terror in his journal The Spectator in 1712, claiming “it does not arise so properly from the description of what is terrible, as from the reflection we make on our selves at the time of reading it,” situating those things that terrify us at the center of our attempts to understand our own identity (Addison 2000, 105).

  Following such critical statements, more writers would come to see the creation of a feeling of terror in readers as a worthy aspiration. One crucial example was prolific English writer Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). Best remembered for his protorealist novels Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), Defoe also wrote numerous tracts, pamphlets, and books about the reality of supernatural phenomena, and this work occupies a prominent position between the apparition narratives of the late seventeenth century and the Gothic fictions of the latter half of the eighteenth. His longer and more influential works in this vein include The Political History of the Devil, As Well Ancient as Modern (1726), A System of Magic, or the History of the Black Art (1726), and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). Presenting itself initially as a compendium of apparition narratives in the tradition of Glanvill, the latter essay is particularly ingenious in its blending of encyclopedic and narrative elements, tied together by a narrating theologian who serves as a modest witness while creating an uncanny atmosphere through an eye for eerie details. Defoe brings to bear his verisimilar skills here just as he did with Robinson Crusoe, making the Essay important as much for its literary techniques as for its apparition accounts.

  French Benedictine monk and researcher Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) took an approach similar to Defoe’s in producing what is probably the most influential collection of eighteenth-century apparition na
rratives. Calmet undertook an exhaustive study of the apparitions of angels, demons, various other spirits, and related occult phenomena, including witchcraft and lycanthropy. The fruits of his labor, Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie (Dissertations on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia) was published in 1746 and in an expanded revised edition in 1751, and was quickly translated into English and numerous other languages, reaching a wide audience. Calmet’s work, though it ultimately attempts to discount the reality of many of these phenomena on Catholic theological as well as on empirical grounds, was often read for the vivid and chilling details of its accounts. In particular, his description of the supposed vampires and revenants of Eastern Europe continued to fuel the popular fascination with such creatures for well over a century, serving as a major source for vampire narratives from Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) through John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

  The middle decades of the eighteenth century also saw a number of British poets produce religious ruminations on mortality that relied heavily on images of death and decay, ostensibly to serve as memento mori (reminders of mortality) and aids to pious meditation. The earliest and most influential example was Anglo-Irish poet Thomas Parnell’s (1679–1718) “Night-Thoughts on Death” (posthumously published by his friend Alexander Pope in a 1722 collection of Parnell’s poetic works). The popular success and critical attention paid to Parnell’s work would inspire many later poets to work in a similar mode. Other important examples include Scottish poet Robert Blair’s (1699–1746) blank verse poem “The Grave” (1743), English poet Edward Young’s (1683–1765) The Complaint: Or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (serially published between 1743 and 1745), and English poet Thomas Gray’s (1716–1771) “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Critics of some of the later and more formulaic examples of what would come to be known as the “Graveyard” or “Boneyard” school of poetry, however, saw the gruesome images of such poems as ultimately exploitative, and their supposed moral and theological purpose as an excuse to revel in morbidity, an accusation that would also be frequently leveled against later Gothic and Dark Romantic writers who learned vital aesthetic lessons from the poets of the “Graveyard school.”

  In 1757, the literary aesthetics of death, pain, power, and cosmic immensity that continue to play a vital role in modern horror were influentially articulated when Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) published his treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Building extensively on the work of earlier writers including Addison as well as philosophers Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, and exemplifying his ideas through the work of great writers including William Shakespeare and John Milton, Burke drew on empirical psychological principles to argue that terror was the most powerful emotion a human being was capable of experiencing, and thereby provided an aesthetic justification that would be seized upon by writers devoted to inspiring awe and terror in readers. Burke could not have anticipated the tremendous influence his Enquiry would have in shaping literary tastes for centuries to come. It would be read, referenced, and reacted to not only by early Gothic writers including Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, but also by later writers including Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the latter of whom would paraphrase Burke in declaring fear to be “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind” (Lovecraft 2012, 25).

  A Timeline of Horror in the Eighteenth Century

  1681

  Joseph Glanvill publishes Saducismus Triumphatus.

  1692

  The Salem witch trials commence.

  1693

  The Salem witch trials continue. Cotton Mather publishes Wonders of the Invisible World.

  1711–1712

  Addison and Steele publish their journal The Spectator, including essays on the role of the sublime and fantastic in literature as well as short Orientalist narratives such as “Santor Barsisa” that will later inspire Gothic writers.

  1727

  Daniel Defoe publishes An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions.

  1746

  Augustin Calmet publishes his “Dissertations on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia.”

  1757

  Edmund Burke publishes his Philosophical Enquiry.

  1762

  The Cock Lane Ghost becomes the subject of popular fascination and is investigated by notable intellectuals including Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith.

  1764

  Horace Walpole publishes The Castle of Otranto.

  1787–1789

  Friedrich von Schiller’s unfinished novel Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer) is serially published in the journal Thalia.

  1789

  The storming of the Bastille occurs ten days after the Marquis de Sade is transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton. The French Revolution continues until 1799, contemporaneous with the peak popularity of the Gothic novel.

  1793

  Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette killed by the Revolutionaries. William Godwin publishes his rationalist Gothic novel Caleb Williams.

  1794

  Ann Radcliffe publishes her wildly popular Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho.

  1796

  Matthew Lewis publishes his Gothic romance The Monk, retrospectively recognized as the first novel of supernatural horror in English.

  It was Horace Walpole (1717–1797) who invented the Gothic as a literary form. Inspired by the medieval revivalism of poets including James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton, Walpole combined his antiquarian enthusiasms with an interest in folkloric superstitions and a desire to explore his own dreams and nightmares, and the result was his pseudo-medieval romance The Castle of Otranto (1764). He presented the first edition of the book as a translation from a thirteenth-century Italian manuscript, and even as historians and philologists decried it as an obvious hoax, the book became a popular success. Walpole appended an apology to the book’s second edition (1765), coining the term “Gothic story” for this new literary form that combined history with fantasy in a manner meant to evoke both wonder and terror, one that would become a vital precursor to modern horror literature.

  By the 1780s in Germany, another precursor emerged in the form of Schauer-romane (shudder-novels). An extension of the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) aesthetic of early romanticism, these novels combined tragedy with mystery and supernaturalism, often focusing on conspiracies, secret societies, and black magic. Despite never being completed, one of the most influential was Friedrich von Schiller’s (1759–1805) Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer, serially published between 1787 and 1789). Also seminal was Christian Heinrich Spiess’s Das Petermännchen (1793; translated as The Dwarf of Westerbourg). Like Walpole’s Otranto, this was a ghost story set in the thirteenth century. These and other Schauer-romane anticipated the British Gothic novels of the 1790s in both subject matter and style, and in some cases would be directly imitated by British writers including Matthew Lewis.

  Lewis was a young English aristocrat whose first and only Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), has a strong claim to be considered the first novel of supernatural horror in English. Partly inspired by the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose popular Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Lewis had devoured and sought to imitate, The Monk draws heavily on the Sturm und Drang writers Lewis avidly consumed as a student of German literature. With its frenetic style, florid descriptions of sexuality and violence, and its unapologetic portrayal of a world in which satanic supernatural powers conspire against humanity, The Monk rejected both Radcliffe’s decorum and the Enlightenment values that led her to explain the seemingly supernatural occurrences in her fictions according to rational, materialist principles. These exces
ses led a scandalized Radcliffe to distinguish between her own moralistic “terror” Gothic romances and Lewis’s “horror” Gothic in an essay titled “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826) that in many ways serves as the first critical attempt to distinguish “horror” as its own literary genre. Radcliffe’s distinction between terror and horror corresponds closely with how horror as a literary genre evolved in the two centuries to come, and would be echoed by later studies including Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) and by Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981).

  Lewis’s novel became an international sensation, its scandalous success carrying it not only throughout Britain, but to France, Germany, and the New World. In Britain, it would inspire more transgressive and horror-focused Gothic fictions including Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). In France, it spurred the popular appetite for the roman noir, inspiring writers including François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil and the Marquis de Sade, and later nineteenth-century writers of horrific fiction including Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Guy de Maupassant. In America, though Charles Brockden Brown’s early Gothic novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) took a psychological approach informed by William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1793), they would nevertheless echo The Monk’s use of a vicious and religiously deluded antihero, whereas Poe’s later forays into the Gothic would share Lewis’s emphasis on overt supernaturalism and the grotesque.