3 Books to Know: Gothic Fiction

Welcome to the 3 Books To Know series, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books. These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies. We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is: Gothic Fiction. - A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe. - The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve. - The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Gothic fiction, which is largely known by the subgenre of Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries. A Sicilian Romance is a gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe. It was her second published work, and was first published anonymously in 1790. The plot concerns the fallen nobility of the house of Mazzini, on the northern shore of Sicily, as related by a tourist who learns of their turbulent history from a monk he meets at the ruins of their once-magnificent castle. The Old English Baron is an early Gothic novel by the English author Clara Reeve. It was first published under this title in 1778, although it had anonymously appeared in 1777 under its original name of The Champion of Virtue, before Samuel Richardson's daughter, Mrs Bridgen, had edited it for her. Apart from typographical errors, the revision was trifling. The Fall of the House of Usher is a narrative short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine before being included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story is a work of gothic fiction and includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities. This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topic.