The most popular Gothic works of the Romantic period, some of which are excerpted in this topic, usually escape such censure. Many Romantic poems have elements of Gothicism without being wholly Gothic works. From its inception, the Gothic tale invited both flattering imitation and critical parody, and indeed the two are not always easy to distinguish. In a similar way, the second generation of major Romantic poets rebelled against the increasing political and aesthetic conservatism of the first. In the Gothic novel, interiors are linked with danger.
Threats come from within the house, within the family, and within the self.
The ever-mounting sense of danger that characterizes the genre depends on the continual revelation of unsuspected depths. The explicit treatment of sexuality among other factors has made the Gothic a genre of interest for psychoanalytic critics. You can see a sampling of these points of view, along with passages from many of the novels that are sampled here, gathered on the Web site Architecture of the Mind. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful has relevance to the Gothic tale as well as to landscape. But whereas the Romantic idea of landscape locates the sublime in nature, the Gothic emphasizes the supernatural and the human.