Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is considered by many literary critics to be the quintessential Gothic novel despite the fact that most of the genre's conventions are absent or employed sparingly. Because many of the literary techniques and themes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein adhere to the conventions of the Gothic genre, it can be considered, primarily, a Gothic novel with important connections to the Romantic movement. The period of the Gothic novel, in which key Gothic texts were produced, is commonly considered to be roughly between 1760 and 1820. A period that extended from what is accepted as the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), to Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and included the first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. Generally, the Gothic novel has been associated with a rebellion against the constraints of neoclassical aesthetic ideals of order and unity, in order to recover a suppressed primitive and barbaric imaginative freedom (Kilgour, 1995, p3) . It is also often considered a premature (and therefore somewhat crude) manifestation of the emerging values ​​of Romanticism. Although the Gothic genre is somewhat obscure and difficult to define, it can be seen as having a number of characteristics or conventions that can be observed in Frankenstein, including formulaic settings, characters and plots, an interest in the sublime, the production of emotion excessive in the reader (particularly that of terror and horror), an emphasis on suspense, the notion of the double and the presence of the supernatural. (Kilgour, 1995; Botting, 1996; Byron, 1998: p71) Gothic settings are typically archaic, harking back to a barbaric past that was with... middle of paper... a vampire and a demon on many occasions and therefore a supernatural aspect surrounds this character. Clery (2000) sees the supernatural as "an opportunity to assert a poetic vision beyond the mundane for the writer and achieve a sublime experience of terror for the audience" (p8), which is how it can be seen to work in Frankenstein. (Byron, 1998: p71) As can be seen, Frankenstein uses many of the conventions of the Gothic genre and can therefore be considered a Gothic novel. His links with the Romantic movement are also evident. The stereotypical settings, characters and plots, the interest in the sublime, the emphasis on suspense, the production of excessive emotions in the reader (particularly that of terror and horror), the presence of the supernatural and the notion of “double” are all characteristics of Frankenstein that illustrate this.