Sorrows of Young Werther
Macpherson’s Ossian
Key tropes:
Aristocratic characters
Narrative stories sold to middle-class, female audiences
Varied locations e.g. Arabia
Antiquated past—passage of time through architecture, documents (epistolary: the Mysterious Document)
Melodrama
Popularity of sentimentalism
Villains doing monstrous things but not necessarily being monsters
John Langhorne, an English clergyman and poet in 1735-1779 reaction to Castle of Otranto
condemned Walpole for ‘re-establishing the barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism’