The Use of Gothic in Literature in the late 18 th and early 19 th Centuries The term ‘Gothic’ in Architecture refers to a revival of a medieval art that was in fashion in Britain from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Such cultural reforms of a fairly fantasized edition of the past together with a sense of the ‘barbaric’ Germanic tribes offered a framework for the surfacing of Gothic as a literary genre. The development of a Gothic literary style was given new momentum in the mid-eighteenth century with the materialization of Enlightenment beliefs that exalted the virtues of rationality. Such ideas were challenged in Britain by the Romantics at the end of the 18 th century, who asserted that the complexity of human experience could not be explained by an inhuman rationalism. For them, the inner worlds of the emotions and the imagination were greater than the claims of, for instance, natural philosophy. The Gothic is at one level closely related to these Romantic considerations, and poets such as Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley at various times used the Gothic to investigate, at different levels of explicitness, the role played by the irrational in criticizing quasi-rationalistic accounts of human experience. Intellectual support was given to this view by philosophies which explored the limits of thought and feeling. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) suggested that the sublime (a major Romantic idea) was related to feelings of terror (rather than with benevolence which was a characteristic of some other models of sublimity) (Smith 2007). Burke argued that transgression and terrifying feelings (associated with mainly imaginary pending violent death) were the most powerful forces that people were subjected to and hence the most sublime. Immanuel Kant’s more meticulously philosophical account of the sublime in The Critique of Judgement (1790) claimed that there was a difference between phenomena (a world of objects) and noumena (a world of ideas), in an examination of the relationship between the mind and the external world. For Kant, the sublime portrayed the limits of subjective experience, and this emphasis on introspection privileges thought and understanding above certain Enlightenment ideas about the presence of an independent or objective reality that can be rationally comprehended. Nevertheless, even though the Gothic often shared in such anti-Enlightenment notions (because it focused on thoughts and feelings), it is vital to recognize that the early Gothic appeared to be highly mechanical, dependent on particular settings, such as castles, monasteries, and ruins, and with characters, such as aristocrats, monks, and nuns who, superficially, appeared to be identical from one novel to another. However, such stories are not as stereotyped as they appear to be, and it is essential to look beyond such narrative props to take into consideration the anti-Enlightenment impulses and related themes and issues which are fundamental to the gothic (Smith 2007). Another important element in any assessment of a Gothic text is its representation of evil. The demonization of particular types of behaviour made noticeable the cland