But despite the horror elements, both Defoe and Swift’s prose is realistic in tone, and qualify more as adventure tales than they do horror. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, itself influenced by Defoe, also features fantastical and supernatural imagery. While best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe has a hand in bridging the gap between horror poetry and theatrical productions and horror fiction, particularly his short stories “The Magician” (published in 1726) and “The Ghost in All the Rooms” (published a year later). There are, as always, a few notable exceptions. While stories from the previous centuries often featured supernatural scenarios and situations (as we have detailed exhaustively in previous columns), most of the novels published during the 1700s feature contemporary (for their time) settings with realistic characters and situations. Novels-a relatively long prose work of narrative fiction-have been around in some form for several centuries, but this century is when they begin to proliferate and dominate. The Elizabethan poets and playwrights have laid the groundwork, building on the myths and folklore and oral tradition that came before them, and Thurg’s cave paintings before that. Īnd since it has been a year in real time, if you need a refresher on those forays, visit the archive of our travels thus far. We also looked at Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, and the enduring impact it had on the horror genre, influencing everyone from Joyce Carol Oates to Stephen King to DC Comics and Dungeons and Dragons. It was Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi that propelled the genre forward in terms of gruesome, macabre and supernatural trappings. And in our last column we visited the Elizabethan era and examined horror fiction on the stage, with the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlow, Ben Jonson, and John Webster. In the twelfth century, we read feminist werewolf fiction. Then, traveling onward through time, we checked out The Oresteia, Beowulf, Dante’s Inferno, Lucian Samosata’s True History, and more. we checked out Theseus and the Minotaur, the tale of Perseus. and learned about things like The Epic of Gilgamesh and the world’s first zombie novel.
Our journey through the history of horror fiction began 20,000 years ago, when we visited the world’s first horror novelist, Thurg. We can pretend that I wasn’t almost burned to death in a terrible mishap and that no time has passed at all. And though it seems like it has been a year since our last column, we can undo that. We are still traveling through time, you and I.
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