Urban Gothic

Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, film horror and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, Ireland and the United States, developing through British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker's Dracula; in the twentieth century it in turn influenced the creation of the Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic subgenres, and interest in it revived from the 1980s onward with works such as Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels drawing on dark city landscapes.