The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper is a novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and is quite often found on high school summer reading lists.
In purely literary terms, “The Yellow Wallpaper” looks back to the tradition of the psychological horror tale as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe. For example, Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” is also told from the point of view of an insane narrator. Going further back, Gilman also draws on the tradition of the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century, which often featured spooky old mansions and young heroines determined to uncover their secrets. Gilman's story is also forward-looking, however, and her moment-by-moment reporting of the narrator's thoughts is clearly a move in the direction of the sort of stream-of-consciousness narration used by such twentieth-century writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. This extract is courtesy of www.sparknotes.com