When the list of 208 titles is uploaded into Voyant, we can get a pretty good sense of the prevalent themes within the genre.
The first word cloud shows the data as-is, while the second shows the results once "romance," "tale," and "novel" are removed (these words are commonly used in subtitles). The word cloud hints that there will be a historical/medieval setting, possibly involving a castle or an abbey, and will probably have a mysterious tone.
On the other hand, I wanted to see if the texts themselves revealed anything about their contents. Along with our four key players, I included two additional works to round out our sample: Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1777), a literary successor to Otranto published twelve years later, and John William Polidori's The Vampyre, written at the same time as Frankenstein and published a year later. The works were uploaded to Voyant in chronological order so that we can see what changes (if any) occured over time.
[Note: If you hover over the "?" in the top right corner, and then click on the "Export a URL" button that looks like a square with an arrow coming out of it, you can open the dashboard below in a larger window.
Some findings:
- The Mysteries of Udolpho is twice the size of the next largest book (The Monk) and nearly eight times larger than the shortest book (The Castle of Otranto). I had to remove the names "Emily," "Montoni," "St," "Aubert," and "Valancourt" from the word list because the frequency of these character names in Udolpho was affecting the overall results.
- Dialogue seems to be used a lot more in pre-1790s novels (based on how often "said" occurs in the first two books). This could be a convention of the time rather than of any particular genre; we would have to compare our works to a sample of non-Gothic texts to explore this further.
- The word cloud shows a lot of "sensory" words: "heard," "thought," "eyes," "heart," "hand." Many of these books involve characters navigating through mysterious circumstances or doubting their senses (as one does when confronted with a ghostly apparition). Whether this is a particularly Gothic pattern or a larger, era-specific convention, we would have to test against non-Genre works to find out more conclusively.
Some favorite views:
