History relates that the Goths were the barbarians who destroyed classical Roman civilization and plunged the civilized world into centuries of ignorance and darkness. And the history of the Goths is depicted as a sordid tale of pillage and plunder, of destruction and tyranny: it is the narrative of the fall of an empire, not the rise of something new in its place. The term gothic came stand for medieval culture, and thus for the culture dominant in England in the Dark Ages a time characterized by the ‘barbaric ignorance’ of its ‘rude and untutored conquerors. In his 1775 Dictionary Dr Johnson defined a Goth as ‘one not civilized, one deficient in general knowledge, a barbarian.’ However, it was in the 18thC that the term gothic was revised and transformed into from a term connoting the unfavourable, unhappy and ruined, to a more positive and confident understanding The 18thC rediscovery of medieval culture, an endeavour known as antiquarianism, completes this revaluation of gothic culture. Richard Hurd, for example launched a complex defence of medieval literary culture in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) arguing that "The ages that are called barbarous present us with many a subject of curious speculation. What for instance, is more remarkable than the Gothic Chivalry? Or the spirit of Romance, which took rise from that singular institution." Looking at the bigger picture Samuel Kilger sees the ‘gothic enlightenment’ as politicized a revaluation of deep British history which helped to reinforce British cultural solidarity in the present. The emergence of gothic fiction represents one of the defining moments when an older chivalric past was idealized at the expense of a classic present. This idea of excavating the past to reconcile the problems present is actually explicit in the term ‘Gothic Novel’. Gothic=old Novel=new. Horace Walpole was the first writer to identify his work under this specific term in the 1765 reprint of ‘The Castle of Otranto’ subtitled ‘A Gothic Story’. Up til then throughout the 18thC most prose fictions referred to themselves as histories, memoirs, or romances. Walpole in the preface to his gothic story explained that he was attempting to blend the 2 types of Romance- the Ancient chivalric romances and neoclassical tragedies of the past with the modern newly ascendant bourgeois novel. It contains many superficial aspects that would become stereotypes of the gothic mode; the castle, the cave, the extinguished lamp, the hollow groan, that would all be repeated by good and bad writers of gothic fiction to come. The most obvious characteristic of The Castle...is its unabashed supernaturalism. The book is filled with elements that defy empirical or rational explanation; a helmet so huge a man can be imprisoned under it, a sword so huge a hundred men strain under its weight, a statue that bleeds a picture that comes off the wall and walks round the room...Walpole claimed to be imitating ancient romance where all was “imagination and improbability”...writers that followed were more subtle in their handling of the supernatural. However in all the books that followed the supernatural events are intimately connected with the basic theme: the restoration of order to a world ...Though later writers go to great lengths to suggest the supernatural, they are fundamentally rationalists who always anchor the main events of their books in the world of material reality. The supernatural doesn’t disappear completely however. These writers were firm believers in the providential doctrine saw the hand of a just and benevolent god at work in the affairs of man. The prophetic dream...Ann Radcliffe was the master of this device. She placed her prophetic dreams in a carefully drawn psychological context...what’s important in these books is not so much the Gothic effects themselves as the intellectual and emotional sources of the characters’ misapprehensions of reality. The primary one is ignorance, the source of superstition...affects people of lower classes in society...the condition and the immediate surroundings and their physical and mental states cause their imaginations to distort the evidence of their senses and create a world that has little basis in reality...the overall idea is that danger inherent in the uncontrolled imagination...Reason versus Imagination...Walpole, Reeve, and their followers present supernatural phenomena as objectively real phenomena in the divine order of things, Radcliffe, Smith, and Other rationalists deliberately avoid the use of supernatural beings. They emphasize the powers of the unrestrained imagination to create deceptive appearances or to misapprehend reality. Thi