The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance.... Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story". The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance. Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival. His declared aim was to combine elements of the medieval romance, which he deemed too fanciful, and the modern novel, which he considered to be too confined to strict realism. The basic plot created many other Gothic staples, including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as countless trappings such as hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines.
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A sea story is a work of fiction or non-fiction set largely at sea. The enclosed setting of life aboard a ship allows an author to portray a social... world in miniature, with characters cut off from the outside world and forced to interact in cramped and stressful conditions. The form has been popular from Homer's Odyssey onwards. Themes can include: Notable exponents of the sea story include: Notable novellas include: In the twentieth century, sea stories were popular subjects for the pulp magazines. Adventure and Blue Book often ran sea stories by writers such as J. Allan Dunn and H. Bedford-Jones as part of their selection of fiction.
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Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural... fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as related static, motion, and virtual arts. Speculative fiction as a category ranges from ancient works to both cutting edge, paradigm-changing and neotraditional works of the 21st century. Speculative fiction can be recognized in works whose authors' intentions or the social contexts of the versions of stories they portrayed is now known, since ancient Greek dramatists such as Euripides whose play Medea seems to have offended Athenian audiences when he fictionally speculated that shamaness Medea killed her own children instead of their being killed by other Corinthians after her departure, and whose Hippolytus, narratively introduced by Aphrodite, Goddess of Love in person, is suspected to have displeased his contemporary audiences because he portrayed Phaedra as too lusty.
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The Lost World literary genre is a fantasy or science fiction genre that involves the discovery of a new world out of time, place, or both. It began... as a subgenre of the late-Victorian imperial romance and remains popular to this day. The genre arose during an era when the fascinating remnants of lost civilizations around the world were being discovered, such as the tombs of Egypt's Valley of the Kings, the semi-mythical stronghold of Troy, the jungle-shrouded pyramids of the Maya, or the cities and palaces of the empire of Assyria. Thus, real stories of archaeological finds by imperial adventurers succeeded in capturing the public's imagination. Between 1871 and the First World War, the number of published "Lost World" narratives, set in every continent, dramatically increased. The genre has similar themes to "mythical kingdoms", such as El Dorado. The hugely popular King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard is sometimes considered the first of the Lost World genre.
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