A-Level English Literature: the Gothic - Otranto, Frankenstein and Dracula

The Gothic is one of the genres around which A level English Literature papers are organised, for example in AQA's option on elements of the Gothic or in OCR's comparative study of the Gothic, and it is a popular choice for independent comparative study. This material studies the genre through three out-of-copyright novels that mark its history: Horace Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' (1764), Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' (quoted from the 1831 text) and Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897). Every question prints the passage it asks about.

You begin with Walpole's giant helmet, the supernatural intrusion into a medieval castle that set the conventions of the genre: the buried crime of the past returning to punish the present. From 'Frankenstein' you read the creation scene, where triumph is narrated as dread; Victor's dream, in which Elizabeth becomes his dead mother's corpse; the creature's claim that he ought to be Victor's Adam but is treated as the fallen angel; Victor's warning to Walton; and the moment when Victor calls the creature his own vampire. From 'Dracula' you read the prefatory note that presents the novel as a set of contemporary documents, the Count's welcome to Jonathan, his crawl down the castle wall, and Mina's joke about the New Woman.

The questions keep the genre's key ideas in view: Burke's sublime, Freud's uncanny, the double, frame and epistolary narration, and critical approaches that read the Gothic through gender (female Gothic), the psyche and empire (reverse colonisation). You are asked to say what a passage does rather than to label devices, and to treat critical readings as arguments to test against the text.

The material offers a quiz of twelve questions with one defensible answer each and an explanation after every answer, twelve flashcards on conventions, terms, critics and key lines, and a printable written work of eight open questions - analysis of printed passages, sympathy for the creature, the narrative structure of 'Frankenstein', late-Victorian contexts of 'Dracula', the sublime, a comparison of the two monsters and an evaluation of psychoanalytic readings - each with a model answer and the key points a strong response should include.

  • Identify the conventions of Gothic fiction and trace them from Walpole to Stoker
  • Analyse Gothic setting, narration and imagery in printed passages from 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula'
  • Explain frame, nested and epistolary narration and their effects
  • Use the ideas of the sublime, the uncanny and the double
  • Relate 'Dracula' to late-Victorian anxieties about gender and invasion
  • Evaluate feminist, psychoanalytic and postcolonial readings of Gothic texts

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE A level English Literature subject content (prose, including prose written before 1900, and study of genre). Quotations from public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg: Walpole, 'The Castle of Otranto' (#696); Mary Shelley, 'Frankenstein', 1831 text (#84); Stoker, 'Dracula' (#345).

Sample question

Horace Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' (1764), often called the first Gothic novel, opens on the wedding day of Manfred's son Conrad, who is found: '...child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.' Which Gothic conventions does this opening establish?

See the answer

A supernatural intrusion into an old aristocratic world, where a buried wrong returns to punish the present

A gigantic helmet falls from nowhere and crushes the heir on his wedding day. The medieval castle, the aristocratic family, the prophecy and the monstrous, supernatural event became the template of Gothic fiction; the plot reveals that the family's power rests on an old usurpation that the past now avenges.

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