奥特兰托堡 (1764)

《奥特兰托堡》（或译《奥托兰多城堡》英语：The Castle of Otranto）是霍勒斯·渥波尔1764年的小说。

情节

奥托兰多亲王曼弗雷德有一儿一女，康拉德和马蒂尔达。他为儿子订婚，对象是维森扎亲王的女儿伊莎贝拉。他担心一则古老的预言应验，因而想要赶紧举办婚礼。因为预言说道：

奥托兰多城堡及其权力，一旦真正的主人扩大到城堡容纳不下他的时候，将不再属于城堡现在的主人。

不料，就在结婚当天，康拉德被一顶天降的巨大头盔砸死。亲王为了保障自己家族对城堡的权力，竟想违背伦理，与伊莎贝拉结婚。于是伊莎贝拉逃跑，遇见了杰罗米神父的儿子奥赛多帮助她。奥赛多因而被亲王打入牢狱。

不久，维森扎亲王派人来寻回女儿，曼弗雷德不肯，执意要跟妻子希波利塔离婚，和伊莎贝拉结婚，然而伊莎贝拉爱上了奥赛多。曼弗雷德得知此事，前去要杀伊莎贝拉，然而，奥赛多爱的人却是马蒂尔达。两人正在幽会之际，曼弗雷德误把女儿当成伊莎贝拉行刺，结果曼弗雷德发现自己刺死女儿，扬言要自杀。当天晚上，一声雷电撼动城堡，原城堡的已故主人阿方索的幽灵现身，告诉众人奥赛多才是奥托兰多城堡真正的继承人。随后，曼弗雷德娓娓道来，原来当年阿方索的管家瑞卡多，也就是他的的祖父，窜改了阿方索遗嘱，把城堡继承权改成了瑞卡多家族，所以曼弗雷德的城堡拥有权其实是篡夺来的。最终，城堡继承权还给了阿方索的后代，杰罗米神父和奥赛多。曼弗雷德和妻子希波利塔进了修道院，而奥赛多走出失去恋人的伤痛后，逐渐发现与伊莎贝拉相处带来的幸福。

影响

《奥特兰托堡》通常被认为是第一部哥特小说，并开创了在18世纪末期到19世纪前期期间非常流行的一种文学体裁。因此，《奥特兰城堡》乃至渥波尔是查尔斯·罗伯特·马图林，安·拉德克利夫，布拉姆·斯托克，爱伦·坡和达夫妮·杜·穆里埃的先驱。

The Castle of Otranto is a novel written by the British Whig politician and historian Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first Gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day Gothic romance/horror books, films, art, music, and the Goth subculture.

Walpole was inspired to write the story after a nightmare he had at his Gothic Revival home, Strawberry Hill House, in Twickenham, southwest London. Claiming he saw a ghost in the nightmare—which featured a "gigantic hand in armour"—Walpole incorporated imagery from this into the novel, and also drew on his knowledge of medieval history.

The novel initiated a literary genre that would become extremely popular in the later 18th and throughout the 19th century, with authors such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and George du Maurier.

History

The Castle of Otranto was written in 1764 during Horace Walpole's tenure as MP for King's Lynn. Walpole was fascinated with medieval history; in 1749 he had begun construction on his own Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill House.

The initial edition was titled in full: The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. This first edition purported to be a translation of a book printed at Naples in 1529 and recently rediscovered in the library of "an ancient Catholic family in the north of England". He employed an archaic style of writing to reinforce this conceit.

The Italian book, it was claimed, derived from a story still older, dating back perhaps as far as the Crusades. This Italian book, along with alleged author "Onuphrio Muralto", were Walpole's fictional creations, and "William Marshal" his pseudonym.

In the second and subsequent editions, Walpole acknowledged authorship of the work, writing: "The favourable manner in which this little piece has been received by the public, calls upon the author to explain the grounds on which he composed it" as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success...." There was some debate at the time about the function of literature; that is, whether works of fiction should be representative of life or more purely imaginative (i.e., natural vs. romantic). The first edition was well received by some reviewers who understood the novel as belonging to medieval fiction, "between 1095, the era of the First Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last", as the first preface states; and some referred to Walpole as an "ingenious translator". Following Walpole's admission of authorship, however, many critics were loath to lavish much praise on the work and dismissed it as absurd, fluffy, romantic fiction, or even unsavory or immoral.

In his 1924 edition of The Castle of Otranto, Montague Summers showed that the life story of Manfred of Sicily inspired some details of the plot. The real medieval castle of Otranto was among Manfred's possessions. He repeated the assertion in 1938 in The Gothic Quest.