This essay examines the structural relationship between the folktale and the gothic novel with focus on characterization. This study will present a clearer definition of the now problematized gothic genre and show how newer genres are influenced by the older ones. This examination is done by doing a close-reading of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which is generally known as the first gothic novel, and comparing it to formalist Vladimir Propp’s findings on the functions of the Russian folktale. Walpole’s novel is used as primary source of data and the key works by Propp is utilized as the theoretical framework. In addition, a couple of critical essays have been looked upon in relation to the previous works. This study finds that there are apparent similarities in structure and narrative in the gothic novel in relation to the folktale such as the presence of the same essential characters and functions. This proves the overlap between the two genres and it would be reasonable to conclude that the gothic genre consists of a part folktale. By the revelation of this previously unknown relationship between the folktale and the gothic genre this essay opens up for further research on the origin and influences of gothic fiction.

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. Desmet and Williams, 2009), both of which base their analyses of the Shakespeare-Gothic intersection on the premise that Shakespearean quotations, characters and events are valuable objects in their own right which mediate on behalf of the 'present' concerns of the agents of textual appropriation. In light of this scholarship, this thesis argues the case for the presence of 'Gothic Shakespeare' in Gothic writing during the latter half of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, it acknowledges the conceptual gap whereby literary borrowings were often denounced as acts of plagiarism. Despite this conceptual problem, it is possible to trace distinct 'Gothic' Shakespeares that dismantle the concept of Shakespeare as a singular ineffable genius by virtue of a textual practice that challenges the concept of the 'genius' Shakespeare as the figurehead of genuine emotion and textual authenticity. This thesis begins by acknowledging the eighteenth-century provenance of Shakespeare's 'Genius', thereby distinguishing between the malevolent barbarian Gothic of Shakespeare's own time and the eighteenth-century Gothic Shakespeares discussed under the term 'appropriation'. It proceeds to examine the Shakespeares of canonical Gothic writers (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) as well as their lesser-known contemporaries (T.J. Horsley Curties and W.H. Ireland). For instance, Walpole conscripts Hamlet in order to mediate his experience of living in England after the death of his father, the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The thesis then argues for the centrality of Shakespeare in the Gothic romance's undercutting of the emergent discourses of emotion (or 'passion'), as represented by the fictions of Radcliffe and Lewis, before moving on to consider Curties's attempted recuperation - in Ethelwina; or, the House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) - of authentic passion, which is mediated through the authenticity apparatus of Edmond Malone's 1790 editions of Shakespeare's plays. It concludes with W.H. Ireland's dismantling of Malone's ceoncept of the 'authentic' Shakespeare through the contemporary transgressions of literary forgery and the evocation of an illicit Shakespeare in his first Gothic romance, The Abbess, also published in 1799.

Furniture history is often considered a niche subject removed from the main discipline of art history, and one that has little to do with the output of painters, sculptors and architects. This thesis, however, connects the key intellectual, artistic and architectural debates surfacing in 'the arts' between 1740 and 1840 with the design of British furniture. Despite the expanding corpus of scholarly monographs and articles dealing with individual cabinet-makers, furniture making in geographic areas and periods of time, little attention has been paid to exploring Gothic furniture made between 1740 and 1840. Indeed, no body of research on 'mainstream' Gothic furniture made at this time has been published. No sustained attempt has been made to trace its stylistic evolution, establish stylistic phases, or to place this development within the context of contemporary architectural practice and historiography — except for the study of A.W.N. Pugin's 'Reformed Gothic'. Neither have furniture historians been willing to explore the aesthetic's connection with the intellectual and sentimental position of 'the Gothic' in the period. This thesis addresses these shortcomings and is the first to bridge the historiographic, cultural and architectural concerns of the time with the stylistic, constructional and material characteristics of Gothic furniture. It argues that it, like architecture, was charged with social and political meanings that included national identity in the eighteenth century — around a century before Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin designed the Palace of Westminster and prominently associated the Gothic legacy with Britishness.