Horace Walpole

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Related to Horace Walpole: Robert Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Walpole, Horace

Born Sept. 24, 1717, in London; died there Mar. 2, 1797. English writer. Son of R. Walpole.

Walpole graduated from Cambridge University. From 1741 to 1767 he was a member of Parliament. In 1747 he purchased an estate, Strawberry Hill, near London, where he built a castle in the Gothic style. He became well known as a collector of works of art and as a patron of the arts. Walpole’s Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1765) and his tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768) are early models of English pre-romanticism. He was also the author of A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (1758) and Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–71). Walpole’s correspondence (published 1798), which spans the period 1732–97, has considerable cultural and historical value.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Zamok Otranto. (Afterword by V. M. Zhirmunskii and N. A. Sigal.) Leningrad, 1967.

REFERENCE

Hazen, A. T. A Bibliography of Horace Walpole. New Haven, 1948.

V. A. KHARITONOV

References in periodicals archive ?

"Hamlet and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 49 (3): 667-692.

La tragicomedia de los hombres y las mujeres corrientes: usos ambiguos y distractores de la risa en The Castle of Otranto y sus prefacios

"Guessing the Mould: Homosocial Sins and Identity in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto 7 Gothic Studies 3 (2001): 229-45.

Transatlantic repurposing: the castle of Otranto and the construction of puritan allegory in the house of the seven gables

THIS winter, following the small exhibition of Salvator Rosa's pictures at the Wallace Collection in 2005, his wild landscapes, which set the scene for such Gothic Novels as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, reappeared at the Dulwich Gallery, London.

Salvator Rosa at the Dulwich Gallery

Projected on facing walls, two Super 8 films, Hippolyta and Manfred (both part of a longer film, A Recess and a Reconstruction, which Herve and Mailler will show for the first time this month), loosely evoked two key figures from Horace Walpole's 1764 gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto.

Louise Herve and Chloe Maillet

The Culture Show (7.00pm) Andrew Graham-Dixon remembers war artist Henry Tonks, Mark Kermode celebrates the 50th anniversary of Peeping Tom, and Tom Dyckhoff visits Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill House.

Pick of the day

For a start, Blanning traces the early stirrings of romanticism back to the mid-18th century, pointing to Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise and Confessions as well as the Sturm und Drang of Goethe and his contemporaries and Horace Walpole's Gothicism.

The Romantic Revolution

Old castles, old pictures, old histories, the babble of old people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one,' So said Horace Walpole [1717-97], youngest son of Great Britain's first prime minister, Robert Walpole.

A sequence of theatrical spaces that played with scale, atmosphere and colour

Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto (1764) is said to be the first Gothic novel, also wrote the first Gothic drama, The Mysterious Mother (1768).

First Gothics: Walpole, Evans, Frank

The gothic convention with its secret history, as popularized by Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, is replaced in the United States by closed local communities with requirements for membership (Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman Major Molineux').

Lennard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora

Even a brief glimpse at the table of contents is rather awe-inspiring, as it surveys a range of authors, including Samuel Richardson, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Horace Walpole, Pauline Hopkins, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, George Eliot, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf.

Freedom's empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity

The Gothic novel's "baptism" in England is often (arguably, as we will see) attributed to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765); its successive tradition has ventured into terrain as sophisticated as the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James.