Release date is 2026-01-25

Haamulinna -- Matthew Gregory Lewis -- Haamulinnan kuvan myöhemmät kehitysvaiheet -- Rikollinen munkki -- Vaeltava juutalainen ja ikuisesti jatkuvan elämän ongelma -- Byronilainen sankari -- Haamut ja demooniset olennot -- Sukurutsaus ja romanttinen erotiikka -- Nuori sankari ja sankaritar sekä muita henkilökuvia -- Muita aiheita -- Jännitys ja kauhu.

Tapio Riikonen

Haamulinna by Eino Railo is a scholarly literary study written in the early 20th century. It examines the origins and development of English Gothic romance, focusing on the “haunted castle” as a central stage and on recurring motifs, figures, and techniques from Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Ann Radcliffe through M. G. Lewis and later Romantic writers.

The opening of the study lays out a broad plan: from the haunted-castle setting and early Gothic novels to Lewis’s biography, later evolutions of the motif, emblematic figures (the criminal monk, the Wandering Jew, the Byronic hero), the supernatural, taboo themes, and the poetics of suspense and terror. The foreword argues that late-18th-century Gothic romance prepared high Romanticism through continuous, organic development rather than sudden revolution, and explains a theme-driven, selective method grounded in primary texts. It also notes source work, translation choices, and acknowledgments. Chapter I then treats Walpole—his antiquarianism, Strawberry Hill’s pseudo-Gothic, the dream behind The Castle of Otranto, and the initial false-translation ruse—before contrasting Reeve’s addition of the locked, haunted suite and Radcliffe’s expansion of the stage into ruins, monasteries, stormy landscapes, ominous clocks, and labyrinthine doors and passages. The emphasis is on how setting and atmosphere generate expectation and fear, defining the core scenic vocabulary of Gothic romance. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Kirja, 1925