Publisher's Synopsis
Differentiated book- It has a historical context with research of the timeThis novel written by Horace Walpole. The castle of Otranto, first published in the year 1764, is considered the work that cemented the genre of the Gothic story, developed mainly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The writer would not recognize his authorship until the second edition of the work, being originally published as a translation of an old text. In it we can find the characteristic elements of Gothic novels: enchanted castles, damsels in distress, ghosts, suspicious noises of unknown origin ... Today, their reading goes unnoticed and terror shines through its absence, the emotional impact is not the same as at the time it was first published.A detail that I want to review (at least it happened to me) is the fact that despite being written in prose the intonation that it gave was more assimilated to the verse, since in many occasions the author seeks rhyme in simple sentences. It tells the story of Prince Manfredo who, on the day of his son Conrado's wedding with the beautiful Isabella, attends his death by being crushed by a large helmet.Given this misfortune and as a result of the infertility of his wife Hippolita (who apart from Conrado had only granted him a daughter, Matilda), Manfredo decides that he should divorce her in favor of Isabella. From this moment on, a series of events that get tangled up and that, in my opinion, make it difficult to follow the text too much.
