The influence of The Castle of Otranto in The Shining, or the reception of eighteenth-century Gothic ghosts in Stephen King’s literature

Abstract

This chapter aims at drawing a thematic and formal outline of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel (focussing mainly on Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto) and its reception on the current American Gothic, led by Stephen King. To do this, we start from the assumption that there are several constant parameters in the evolution of the Gothic genre, namely: the limits of rationality and passions, the family ties, the settings, the claustrophobic atmosphere, etc. Due to King’s enormous literary production, one of his most relevant works has been chosen: The Shining, in order to carry out a comparative analysis underlining the reception, the evolution and the interferences of elements from the beginnings of the Gothic literature.