Introduction: The Supernatural between Fact and Fiction, from the Gothic to the Fin de Siècle

Introductory essay to the the section on the "The Representation of the Wonderful and the Preternatural between the Gothic Novel and Fin-de-Siècle Literature" of the journal. It deals with the rise of the Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto", and its representation of supernatural events. These were justified, initially, by an antiquarian approach to the description of those events and then, in the preface to the second edition of the novel, by the author's desire to mix the fantastic style of the romance with the novel's attention to details. The essay considers the bifurcation of the Gothic at the turn of the eighteenth century between a more realistic form, based on the historical depiction of characters and events and on a "natural explanation" of preternatural events, and a form based on narrative and moral excesses, especially in Matthew Lewis's "The Monk". The essay considers the partial waning of the Gothic in the nineteenth century and its reappearance in the works of realist writers, and the final return of the supernatural at the end of the nineteenth century, which paved the way for the Modernist redefinition of the very aims and scope of novel writing. A coda concludes the essay by pointing out that supernatural fiction may help society to counterpoise the excessive "disenchantment of the world" that modern secularisation has brought about.