The Gothic
Most critics would agree that there are three types of Gothic fiction:
Horror Gothic
Sentimental Gothic
Philosophical Gothic
Horror gothic has tended to revolve around descriptions of criminality or of violent supernatural events. Many of Poe’s most popular stories, “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” or stories in the genre of the horror Gothic, because both are about criminals, and also about the power of the subconscious to make us behave in sometimes horrible ways. This strand of the Gothic is undeniably the most popular today, but you should alsol recall Dr.Quamen’s lectures on the psychological context of Frankenstein. We should not be surprised that an age that became especially interested in the motives behind human action would also gravitate to a literature that explored the most disturbing potential of the human mind.
This was popularized by Ann Radcliffe, who was an immensely popular writer in the 17 and 1800s. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is probably her most popular novel. The sentimental gothic is generally about the role of women in society, although it also spoke to English and European anxieties about the under-classed and the newly emerging literate classes. According to some critics, what the sentimental gothic did was basically to put into an entertaining form the very popular genre of the female conduct manual.
According to Lee E. Heller:
Philosophical Gothic made explicit the concerns about character, conduct, and education that underlay the emergence of popular Gothic fiction; in place of the machinery of sentimental and horror Gothic, it explored the horrific elements of human personality, and the forces--including education and reading--that go into their creation. Philosophic Gothic did not simply provide education, like its sentimental counterpart, or seem, like horror Gothic, to subvert it; it offered a kind of scientific study of the making of human beings.