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About The Foundations of Fiction - Gothic Horror: Stories that helped shape one of literatures most acclaimed genres

In this series we turn the pages of classic short stories to put together the literary building blocks of how a particular genre or theme began, how it built its foundations to become the well-loved and well-worn genre that it is today. Do authors have the same ideas at more or less the same time? Or can they sniff out an opportunity as to which way the tastes of an audience are moving. Success undoubtedly builds success and in literary terms we can more politely say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the surest way to reach a hungry readership is to build on the fortune and flair of your literary colleagues. The mere placing of these two words together creates a picture and a feeling that dark times are coming. Something evil, perhaps unfathomable, will be launched upon us by an author’s imagination that is sure to bring consequences that may only unsettle but equally may go much, much further than anyone, at first, imagined. 01 - Foundations of Fiction - Gothic Horror - An Introduction 2 - The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe 3 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens 4 - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving 5 - Olalla by Robert Louis Stevenson 6 - The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin 7 - The Dream by Mary Shelley 8 - Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu 9 - The Lifted Veil by George Eliot 10 - Count Magnus by M R James 11 - The Sand-Man by E T A Hoffman 12 - The Striding Place by Gertrude Atherton 13 - Thurnley Abbey by Perceval Landon 14 - The Yellow Sign by Robert W Chambers 15 - The Three Sisters by W W Jacobs 16 - Vampirismus or Aurelia by E T A Hoffman 17 - The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe 18 - A Diagnosis of Death by Ambrose Bierce 19 - Wake Not the Dead by Ernst Raupach