But most of all, Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto, a text which not only pioneered a literary genre, the Gothic novel, but also neatly drew on and sublimated his expertise as antiquarian, builder, and politician. Finally, while his father ruled as prime minister, Walpole sat in Parliament and indulged in vicarious dreams of power in promoting the political ambitions of one of his cousins, General Henry Conway. While his father built a Palladian mansion of gigantic proportions, Walpole transformed a quaint country house, Strawberry Hill, into a trim "toy" castle whose hodgepodge medieval details made Gothic architecture fashionable with the upper class. While Sir Robert amassed an invaluable art collection of old masters that was later to become the core of the Hermitage Museum in Russia, Horace Walpole collected innumerable prints, miniatures, and drawings that soon established him as one of the most knowledgeable antiquarians of his time. However, as a younger son, he did not inherit his father's large estate and therefore could never directly rival his father's accomplishments as an art collector or a builder. Walpole worshipped his father and attempted all his life to be worthy of his parent's mighty fame.
Horace Walpole was himself a Member of Parliament from 1741 to 1768, yet he is remembered more for his legacy as a novelist, a builder, and an antiquarian than for his work in Parliament. Horace Walpole was the third son of the prominent statesman and Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. The next day, all that Walpole could recall of the dream was that "I had thought myself in an ancient castle.and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour." Later that evening, Walpole "sat down, and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate." A classic was born. Yet, far from being the fruit of deliberate and painstaking planning or tentative drafts, The Castle of Otranto was born of a dream that came to haunt Walpole's sleep one night in June 1764. Walpole's novel accomplished what no other novel had attempted before: to delight its readers with a tale of horrors, to make them enjoy what they shuddered to read, in other words to find beauty amidst literary materials ostensibly laced with ugliness and horror. With its fantastic apparitions, its ominous prophecies, and its complicated underground passages, The Castle of Otranto heralded a new genre, the Gothic novel, still present in our literary landscape today.
ExcerptsThe Castle of Otranto was published pseudonymously in 1765 by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), son of one of England's most influential eighteenth-century prime ministers, Sir Robert Walpole.
0 kommentar(er)
