Gothic fiction is a type of romance popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The form was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), whose popularity attracted many imitations. Gothic fiction, particularly in prose narrative highlighted by such now-classic “Gothic” as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, and Henry James’s serialized novella The Turn of the Screw. These stories, usually set in medieval castles complete with secret passageways, mysterious dungeons, peripatetic ghosts, and much gloom and supernatural paraphernalia, were thrillers designed to evoke genteel shudders, although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817), one of the most original of the Gothic novels, had a more serious purpose. The influence of this genre extended to such works as Coleridge’s “Christabel,” the novels of the Brontës, the mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe, and the writings of innumerable imitators. Recent critics have interpreted the Gothic elements not only as melodramatic devices calculated to evoke terror in the reader but also as symbolic manifestations of the characters’ own unconscious fears or spiritual confusion.