I do not much observe pictures", or looking and images in Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto"

Abstract

This article discusses Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto from the perspective of the notion and the activity of looking or being looked at. It is argued that the power of the gaze and the particular semiotics of “ocular economy”, while to some extent linked to biographical contexts, can also be noticed in Walpole’s text itself. What is studied is not only the way in which images are used in the text, i.e. what function they perform, but also how they structure the importance of an appeal to vision and images within hauntological perspective and the Gothic genre of literature.