The universal appeal of death is not something recently discovered; in fact there is almost no other topic about which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little over time. As human beings we have the unique ability to be aware of our mortality. This awareness means that worry about death is never far from our minds, all it takes is opening a newspaper to reveal how obsessed we are with death. But, despite being an obsession, it is also at the same time something that culture imposes as a forbidden subject. This conflict that society creates about our feelings towards death is largely responsible for the popularity of Gothic fiction. After all, life in Gothic fiction never frees itself from the presence or threat of death. It allows us to explore something that is a concept familiar to all of us, but in the safety of fiction. While death is something we are all humanly aware of, it is also something we know relatively little about. It is not possible to experience death and then write about it: it must always and simply be represented. But this in itself has created the problem that we do not have a single definition of what is meant by “death,” but that death repeatedly emerges as referring to more than one state. It is a theme represented and explored through many motifs and as society's definition of death varies, as do definitions within Gothic fiction. The proposed thesis will address some of the different definitions of death through a careful examination of three Gothic texts taken from the 19th century. century. The three main texts on which this thesis will focus are "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, "Varney the Vampire: The Feast of Blood" by James Malcolm Rymer and "The Masque of the King" by Edgar Allen Poe... ... .+red+death+poeMorris, D. (1985) Gothic Sublimity. New Literary History: The Sublime and the Beautiful: Vol. 16 (2) Johns Hopkins University Press. Razinsky, Lyran. (2009) How to look death in the eye: Freud and Bataille. Substance 38.2: 63-88. MUSE project. Network. November 24, 2013. .Reese, Diana. (2009) Reproducing the Enlightenment: Paradoxes in the life of the body politic. Walter de Grutyer Schor, Esther. Ed. (2003) Mary Shelley's Cambridge Companion. Cambridge University Press.Segal, Alan. (2010) Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. Random House Publishers.Senf, Carol A. (1988) The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. The University of Wisconsin Press.Smith, Andrew. Hughes, William. Eds. (2012) The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh University Press.