Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820

In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years'' War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continui...