Imagining the Undefined Castle in The Castle of Otranto: Engravings and Interpretations

Citation

Lindfield P (2017) Imagining the Undefined Castle in The Castle of Otranto: Engravings and Interpretations. Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, 18 (3), pp. 46-63. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1591

Abstract
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.

Keywords
Gothic Revival; Strawberry Hill; The Castle of Otranto; Gothic novel; Gothic imagination; book illustration; Gothic art; visual culture; architecture

Journal
Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative: Volume 18, Issue 3