mid-eighteenth century works that mark a watershed in the history of the novel. These short novels, published within the same decade–Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771)–helped produce the turn from social realism to sentimentality and strangeness that will characterize works of the Romantic era as well as popular novels, Gothic spectacles (including film), and all literary works interested in modern notions of individualism and human sympathy.

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