Gothic British Literature before the 1800s & tropes?

By Sonnet_Hardcover77

Hey everyone, So I’ve been asked to show that I can teach undergraduate-level research skills to some current reference librarians and their supervisor. The assignment is that they’ll be doing a literature review on tropes in gothic novels. The module description says “English literature from its beginning through the eighteenth century,” and it supposedly goes up to 1800. The problem is, a lot of the websites I’m finding for gothic novels keep pointing me to things like Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, but that came out in 1818, so I’m not sure it’s actually within scope. I also saw that Matthew Lewis’s *The Monk* is supposed to be one of the earlier gothic novels, but I haven’t read it, and I’m still not really sure what “tropes” refers to in this context. Could someone help me sort this out or lay it out a bit? Thanks so much!