The Gothic Mode

Dark power! With shudd'ring, meek submitted thought
Be mine to read the visions old
Which thy awak'ning bards have told,
And, lest thou meet my blasted view,
Hold each strange tale devoutly true.
-William Collins, Ode to Fear
What is Gothic Literature?
During the last decades of the eighteenth century, England found itself in the midst of a societal unraveling. The philosophies of Shaftsbury, Adam Smith, and David Hume, which for most of the century had provided the intellectual classes with theories of action and motivation that justified their self-interested behavior began to reveal th…