Terror And Wonder: The Gothic Imagination

It is 250 years since the first Gothic novel appeared: Horace Walpole’s The Castle Of Otranto (1764). The British Library has commemorated this in a wideranging exploration of British Gothic – using books, paintings, posters, art objects, film clips and ephemera – which traces the genre’s roots in 18th-century English literature to its ghoulish efflorescence in contemporary culture. Nowadays, the Gothic seems positively mainstream: zombies loll about on television and interestingly pale vampires contend for girls with the local lycanthropes.

Antiquarian Walpole initially passed off his novel Otranto as a found manuscript. This populist genre prospered on a growing fascination with the contingent, death, the supernatural and the late medieval world that opposed the dominant sense of Enlightenment rationality.

Women authors such as Anne Radcliffe used the genre to explore femininity, while Mary Shelley and the Brontës were influenced by Romantic preoccupations with rebellion and freedom. Victorians like Dickens introduced urban Gothic born of the fear and power of a monstrous London, while the 20th century saw a snowballing profusion of Gothic in film, television, video games, fashion and comic books. Alexander McQueen’s crypt of couture fashion sits alongside Hammer Horror films.

This is an extensive and inventive exhibition, but you’ll wish it were even larger. With its British focus it cannot examine the American or European Gothic traditions. There’s little on the popular Gothic melodrama of 19th-century theatre, or how Gothic imagery has been used to demonise certain groups, such as Victorian images of the ‘Irish Frankenstein’. There could have been more on how the genre has been ambiguously enabling and disabling for women, offering the possibilities of freedom and sexual excitement among its images of threat and violence.

The exhibition shows clearly how the Gothic has changed and mutated as it has grown; however, it also continues to reflect its readers’ and viewers’ needs and desires. Martin Parr’s photos of the Whitby Goth Weekend 2014 show a rare glimpse of Britain’s contemporary Goth culture.

The handsomely illustrated accompanying book, Terror And Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (British Library, £25), edited by Dale Townshend, reconnoitres such complex issues. Like the undead, the Gothic continually surprises: eternally young, gloriously decadent and curiously vivacious at 250.

Until 20 January at the British Library, Euston Road, London NW1: 01937-546546, www.bl.uk/gothic