The Castle of Otranto

This article discusses Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto from the perspective of the notion and the activity of looking or being looked at. It is argued that the power of the gaze and the particular semiotics of " ocular economy " , while to some extent linked to biographical contexts, can also be noticed in Walpole's text itself. What is studied is not only the way in which images are used in the text, i.e. what function they perform, but also how they structure the importance of an appeal to vision and images within hauntological perspective and the Gothic genre of literature. R

The Castle of Otranto was a pioneering work: the second edition was the first piece of literary work to include ‘a Gothic story’ in its title, and it is frequently held up as the first in a long line of Gothic novels. Literary scholars have afforded it significant attention, but little has been written about Otranto’s engraved illustrations, first incorporated in the sixth, 1791, edition. This essay examines how the novel was visualised in Georgian engravings, and questions whether they present a castle that we can immediately recognise, to use Walpole’s phrase, as a ‘child of Strawberry [Hill]’, his Gothic villa.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796) using two essays on the aesthetics of fear-Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Freud's The Uncanny (1919)-and to illustrate the technical leap the Gothic genre made

In this paper I will shed light on the very essence and characteristics of the gothic novel, in the perspective of Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1765) and Jane Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818). The Gothic novel primarily, is born in such a world which praises rationality and morality.

The aim of the paper is to examine Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher”
against the legacy of the Early English Gothic and establish a connection between the two. Firstly,
an overview of the works of the Gothic genre in England is given, followed by a short timeline of
the works in the genre on the American continent with special regard to the work of E. A. Poe
and the short story upon which this paper focuses. Several pivotal points are used to establish
a correlation with Poe’s story and the works of the Early Gothic, such as the setting, family
relations, the treatment of madness, intensity of emotions, the role of prophecy, the structure
of the narrative, and the supernatural occurrences. The conclusion summarizes the influence
early Gothic works had on E. A. Poe and how his story had enriched the entire Gothic genre.

{Nina Merkofer, University of Basel} Ancient castles and ivy-covered ruins with spiral staircases, eerie dungeons, and hidden trap doors set the scenery for terrific tales of lurking villains, mysterious outsiders, fair maidens, valorous heroes, and supernatural on-goings. These dark, uncanny, and suspenseful stories draw the readers into the mysterious and fantastic world of the Gothic. Surrounded by the
ideas of enlightenment, Gothic literature presented a backlash against the predictability and regularity of the literature of the Age of Reason. The core ideas of this literary trend were retrieved from the stories of traditional folksay and from gripping mysteries of the gloomy past.

Course Description Students critically read, analyze, and write about the popular genre of the Gothic. As represented in both literary and visual terms, in both Europe and the United States beginning in the late-18th century to today. Key concepts include horror, haunting, madness, and monsters.

It:
Enrico di Ventimiglia fu il Capitano delle navi siciliane che si unirono alla flotta napoletana per liberare Otranto nel 1480. Il lavoro riporta due documenti scritti dal Viceré di Sicilia per il Capitano e individua i tempi e le risorse che furono utilizzate nella composizione della flotta. Inoltre, vengono identificati alcuni personaggi, che giunsero ad Otranto sotto il comando di Enrico.
En:
Enrico di Ventimiglia was the Captain of the Sicilian ships which joined the Neapolitan fleet to free Otranto in 1480. This study provides two documents written by the Viceroy of Sicily for the Captain and identifies the times and resources that were used in the composition of the fleet. Finally, some characters, who came to Otranto under Enrico's command, are identified.

Horace Walpole (1717–97) is well known for two important Gothic projects realised in mid eighteenth-century Britain: his villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (1747/8–80); and The Castle of Otranto (1764), a Gothic novel. These two manifestations of Walpole’s ‘Gothic imagination’ are frequently linked in critical literature on the Gothic Revival and medievalism more broadly; the relationship between Strawberry Hill, Otranto and manuscript illustrations visualising Otranto’s narrative has, on the other hand, received far less attention. This article brings together a number of important and hitherto overlooked sources that help address this imbalance. In particular, it examines two large-scale watercolours by John Carter (1748–1817) that narrate some of Otranto’s pivotal scenes, allowing critically overlooked subtleties in their iconographies to emerge. The work establishes how Carter’s pre-existing interests — in particular, in Gothic architectural forms and heraldry — are harnessed to govern his representations of Otranto. These paintings, together with Carter’s other illustrations, demonstrate Walpole’s authorship of Otranto, expressed through codes hidden in plain sight. Unlike the frequently touted link between Strawberry Hill and Otranto in secondary criticism, Carter’s illustrations, the argument reveals, does not explicitly make this connection.

Αν ο αφορισμός του Derridá «δεν υπάρχει τίποτα εκτός κειμένου» 1 έχει έστω και μερική ισχύ, τότε μας επιτρέπει να προβούμε σε μια κειμενοκεντρική ανάλυση δυο λογοτεχνικών αποσπασμάτων διαφορετικής προέλευσης, όσον αφορά τον συγγραφέα, την τεχνοτροπία και τα ιστορικοκοινωνικά συμφραζόμενά τους. Θα ασχοληθούμε, εν προκειμένω, με Το κάστρο του Οτράντο του Horace Walpole και τους Μαλαβόλια του Giovanni Verga. Θα ακολουθήσουμε επαγωγική πορεία ώστε, ανατέμνοντας τα κείμενα και αποκωδικοποιώντας τεχνικές σε επίπεδο μορφής και περιεχομένου, να αντιληφθούμε ότι «ο τρόπος με τον οποίο η «μορφή» γλυστράει μέσα στο «είδος» μας υπενθυμίζει για μια ακόμα φορά την κοινωνική και θεσμική διάσταση της λογοτεχνικής ταυτότητας». 2 Εν συνεχεία, αφού πιστοποιήσουμε το λογοτεχνικό ρεύμα στο οποίο εντάσσεται το κάθε απόσπασμα, θα επιχειρήσουμε μια συγκριτική διερεύνηση της λειτουργίας του Κακού, εστιάζοντας στην πλοκή και στους χαρακτήρες των έργων.

As the Gothic Literary movement captured the European and British imagination in the wake of the upheavals of the French Revolution and later Napoleonic period, it became an outlet for women to express their desire to break free from the confines imposed upon them.  Works of literature in the Gothic genre by female authors of the late 18th century and 19th century express these desires through the peregrinations of the heroines. The circumstances that the heroines of these novels flee reflect the dangers and restraints that women lived with in these times.

Sources of the Siege of Otranto Concerning Hungary (1480—1481)

The Turks occupied the town of Otranto in-Italy in August 1480 and King Matthias of Hungary sent a contingent of 700 men to help his relative King Ferrante of Naples to liberate the town in Spring 1481. The Italian historians wrote about the event — and the brave fight of the Hungarian contingent — in detail. These descriptions have not been used by the Hungarian historiography yet, or only partially. This material publishes details from these accounts in Hungarian translation, which refer to the Hungarian contingent.

It: Enrico di Ventimiglia fu il Capitano delle navi siciliane che si unirono alla flotta napoletana per liberare Otranto nel 1480. Il lavoro riporta due documenti scritti dal Viceré di Sicilia per il Capitano e individua i tempi e le risorse che furono utilizzate nella composizione della flotta. Inoltre, vengono identificati alcuni personaggi, che giunsero ad Otranto sotto il comando di Enrico. En: Enrico di Ventimiglia was the Captain of the Sicilian ships which joined the Neapolitan fleet to free Otranto in 1480. This study provides two documents written by the Viceroy of Sicily for the Captain and identifies the times and resources that were used in the composition of the fleet. Finally, some characters, who came to Otranto under Enrico's command, are identified.

Questo è il primo dei due articoli, dedicati alla conquista turca di Otranto del 1480 e alla riconquista aragonese dell’anno successivo per l’Associazione Parentesi Storiche, con cui ho pubblicato due articoli, intitolati "Palermo fiammeggiante: un matrimonio regale nella Sicilia medievale. Il sodalizio tra Guglielmo II e Giovanna d'Inghilterra del 1177" e "Carlo Magno fu davvero il padre dell’Europa? Le risposte di Alessandro Barbero in un libro di grande successo internazionale".
Il mio intento è semplicemente raccontare gli avvenimenti, senza entrare nel dibattito sul martirio degli ottocento idruntini.

Departing from Ariovaldo Vidal’s statement, in his foreword to the Brazilian translation of The Castle of Otranto, that the Gothic sources were spread upon literary and social history waiting for someone (Horace Walpole) to collect them in order to create a new literary genre, and connecting imagination to such statement, my purpose in this paper is to make some notes on what would possibly be these sources referred by Vidal. By the means of thinking on the Darkness as a semi-concept, a perspective largely inspired in Fred Botting’s Gothic (2014), I intend to look for the origins of Gothic fiction in texts by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton.

The MediaEvo Project aims to develop a multichannel and multi-sensory platform for edutainment in cultural heritage for the realization of a digital didactic game oriented towards the knowledge of medieval history and society by means of the integration of human sciences and new data processing technologies. During the project it has been possible to test the possible interactions between historical research, morphological inquiries, data management systems and the definition of a virtual immersive platform for playing and educating. The platform has also proved to be a means for validating hypotheses and findings formulated by researchers. This paper introduces the theoretical questions related to the educative use of Virtual Reality technology and describes the steps of the reconstruction of the town of Otranto in the Middle Ages: data collection and integration, organization of work, peripherals and software applications.

An authenticator of the story and a well-tested enhancer of immersion, the  trope  of  the  found  manuscript  has  been  a  persistent  presence  in Gothic writing since the birth of the genre. The narrative frame offered by  purported  textual  artifacts  has  always  aligned  well  with  the genre’s preoccupation  with  questions  of  literary integrity,  veracity, authorial originality, ontological anxiety and agency. However, for some time now the  application  of  the  found  manuscript  convention  to Gothic fiction has been reduced to a mere token of the genre, failing to gain impact or credibility. A revival of the convention appears to have taken place with the remediation and appropriation of the principally literary trope by the language of film, more specifically, the found footage horror subgenre.

The article wishes to survey the common modes and purposes of the found manuscript device (by referring mostly to works of classical Gothic literature, such as  The Castle of Otranto,  Dracula and  Frankenstein) to further utilize Dirk Delabastita’s theories on intersemiotic translation and investigate the gains and losses coming with transfiguring the device into the visual form. Found  footage horrors  have  remained  both  exceptionally  popular with audiences and successful at prolonging the convention by inventing a number of strategies related to performing authenticity. The three films considered for analysis, The Blair Witch Project (1999),  Paranormal Activity (2007) and REC (2007), exhibit clear literary provenance, yet they also enhance purporting credibility respectively by rendering visual rawness, appealing to voyeuristic tastes, and exploiting susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking.

How to Cite:
Sawczuk, T. (2020). Taking Horror as You Find It: From Found Manuscripts to Found Footage Aesthetics. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (10), 223-235. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.10.14

The consideration of Horace Walpole as the first gothic author of the history of literature was not applauded by most of his contemporaries. These critics only acclaimed artistic works which represented the aesthetic of the Enlightenment period: reason and logic. Nevertheless, the succeeding generations left behind the criticism of narrations which brought back the superstition and the supernatural from the Dark Ages, and accepted and embraced the gothic genre as part of their culture. The aim of this paper is consequently to study the periods of the Gothic, valuate the criticism of Walpole , and examine and compare the works of Walpole and Edmund Burke, by focusing on the notion of sublime, theorised by the latter author in his paper A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The idea of the sublime in the novel is studied with regards to Burke’s ideas: astonishment through passion, terror, power, vastness and darkness.

The MediaEvo Project aims to develop a multichannel and multi-sensory platform for edutainment in cultural heritage for the realization of a digital didactic game oriented towards the knowledge of medieval history and society by means of the integration of human sciences and new data processing technologies. During the project it has been possible to test the possible interactions between historical research, morphological inquiries, data management systems and the definition of a virtual immersive platform for playing and educating. The platform has also proved to be a means for validating hypotheses and findings formulated by researchers. This paper introduces the theoretical questions related to the educative use of Virtual Reality technology and describes the steps of the reconstruction of the town of Otranto in the Middle Ages: data collection and integration, organization of work, peripherals and software applications.