The Gothic Novel – The Most Important and Influential Genre Of Literature

This article reports on the gothic novel and its characteristics, which move and heighten human emotions through the description of scary, fantastic, ghostly events. Aim of the planned article: The aim is to counteract the lack of clarity in the descriptions of the genre as well as in the literary terminology of the gothic novel in order to develop a more strictly differentiated concept of the genre. It is also about understanding the origins and cultural-historical significance of the horror novel as a popular border phenomenon between the Enlightenment and modernity.