Introduction to Gothic fiction:

"A type of novel or romance popular in the late 18th and early 19th century. The word "Gothic" had come to mean 'wild', 'barbarous' and 'crude', qualities which writers found it attractive to cultivate in reaction against the sedate neoclassicism of earlier 18th century culture. Gothic novels were usually set in the past(most often the medieval past) and in foreign countries; they took place in monasteries, castles dungeons and mountainous landscapes. The plots hinged on suspense and mystery, involving the fantastic and the supernatural."

Source: "The Cambridge guide to Literature in English"

"...Gothic writing emerges at a particular and definable stage in the development of class relations: we may define this as the stage when the bourgeoisie, having to all intents and purposes gained social power, began to try to understand the conditions and history of their own ascent. This, surely, is the reason for the emphasis in the literature on recapturing history, on forming history into patterns which are capable of explaining present situations.... The coming of industry, the move towards the city, the regularization of patterns of labour in the late eighteenth century, set up a world in which older, 'natural' ways of governing the individual life--the seasons, the weather, simple laws of exchange—become increasingly as parts of a greater, less easily comprehended whole. The individual comes to see himself at the mercy of forces which in fundamental ways elude his understanding. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational."

Source: David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980).