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The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.6
EAN: 9780192834409
ISBN: 0192834401
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: July 16, 1998
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editorial Review:
First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favorite among his numerous works. The novel is reprinted here from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Oxford World Classics edition
I have to agree with the consensus of reviewers here: If you are looking for an excellent Gothic novel to read, this one is not it. If you are studying the history of Gothic literature and aesthetics, this novel is fundamental.
I want to recommend highly the introduction by E.J. Clery to the Oxford World Classics edition. Clery provides a survey of the various ways of interpreting the novel, and amply explains the novel's strengths and weaknesses in the context of the different interpretations. ... Read More
Rating: - Powerful whimsy
This review refers to the Oxford World's Classics edition, edited by WS Lewis, with a 26-page introduction and eight pages of endnotes by EJ Clery. There is a select bibliography and a chronology of the author, Horace Walpole. Importantly, the book includes both the first and second editions' title-pages and prefaces.
The first edition, "The Castle of Otranto: A Story, translated by William Marshal", was published in December 1764 (but marked 1765 on the title-page). It's preface tried - and succeeded ... Read More
Rating: - Probably better in its day
This book, like Pamela for feminist literary history, is important due to the fact that it was the first gothic novel ever written. The voice is a good one for the story, deep, reverant, dramatic; the writing is of excellent breed as well. With that said, however, so much has been ripped-off from this novel, and into novels that we've already read, that the story itself comes off as a bit cliche, not to mention ridiculous. Although the hyperbole of the novel is based off sybolic intentions, the best ... Read More
Rating: - Walpole's Castle: More Historical Then Entertaining
When Horace Walpole published THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO in 1794, his reading public was unprepared for what was to them a floodtide of unrestrained emotion. It had only been recently that the concept of "sensibility" in writing had been in vogue. In novels of this type (later popularized by Austen) the protagonist, usually a well-born female, would be subject to a non-stop series of emotional excesses like fainting, weeping, and otherwise losing all restraint. And lying behind this relatively recent vogue of sensibility ... Read More
Rating:  - Lovely, trashy early novel
The Castle of Otranto isn't the best novel you'll ever read, since its characters are more like "types" than living human beings. That said, it's a breezy example of an early novel, before the Victorians got hold of the form and made the books longer and more "respectable." This is one of the books that Jane Austen's gothic-novel-obsessed character Catherine Morland (in Northanger Abbey) would have read to scare herself out of her wits. For that reason alone it's worth reading--to understand what types of books Jane ... Read More
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