This is an attempt not to retrace a historical development, but to make visible significant stages in the realization of forms of terror and horror and the ways in which these forms were “reshaped” between 1798 and 1838. And in the following study of three texts — Joseph Alois Gleich's Wallrab von Schreckenhorn (Wallrab of Schreckenhorn, 1798), E. T. A. Hoffmann's Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil's Elixirs, 1815), and Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) — it should become clear that what marks the gothic novel as a genre is not a repertoire of motifs or a particular setting (ruined houses, crypts, and cemeteries), but rather that it subverts its own classification as a genre and produces terror as a narrative mode.

Joseph Alois Gleich, Wallrab von Schreckenhorn

A first glance at the gothic novels of Joseph Alois Gleich shows that terror and horror are linked to the immediate presence of persons and bodies. Horror is evoked by the presence of eerie and indeterminate figures, evil knights, sorceresses, ghosts, and shape-shifters. Horror is always experienced in the context of contact and interaction. It is persons and bodies (including beings whose status is, admittedly, dubious) that threaten persons and bodies, and it is the direct contact of persons and bodies (including entities of dubious status) that threatens the integrity of individual and family, religious and social order. Gleich's protagonists are either abducted or physically harmed; they are confined in dark dungeons and forced to witness horrifying scenes.