As ironic as it is for an architecture style with an origin story of striving to let Divine Light inside, Gothic architecture has an association with the dark and macabre. As the Gothic Revival died giving way to the modern architecture, Bram Stoker released Dracula, one of the most famous Gothic Horror novels. Gothic literature had originated in 1764, when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto.
Gothic literature seemingly represented an opposing view of the past from the architecture of the Gothic Revival. Instead of focusing on restoring the highly pious aspect of the Medieval era, the literature explored the darker aspects of fears, temptations, terror, and the reactions of the human psyche. The genre was named for the aesthetic of the stories, they were often located, at least partially, in ruins of old Gothic churches or castles. Gothic lit was a very scenery-based style of writing often, with the architecture mirroring the characters and their mindsets. Gothic ruins thus became associated with mystery and the darker elements of humanity.
Gothic lit was written for more than a century, spanning from Walpole to Shelley’s Frankenstein (1829), Victor’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), to Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, as well as Edgar Allan Poe’s entire career. The associations developed through the stories became the Goth style that has continued into the modern day.
