The Gothic novel as a genre invented by Horace Walpole is deeply entrenched in the issue of presenting truth because it is characterised by both the "ancient" and "modern" romances, whose discrepancy on whether literature should be attached to reason or imagination remains problematic. This thesis aims to examine this issue of truth in the light of the comic elements in three early Gothic novels, namely Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Lewis's The Monk (1794). It argues that the comic as the element signifying the incongruity of the Gothic novels is placed in a critical position to express the epistemological ambivalence of the texts. The thesis first shows that the comic in the Gothic novels comic displays contradictory impulses: it is both a proponent of "genius" in the eighteenth century Gothic aesthetics, an idealised epistemological notion on the synthesis between reason and imagination which believed once possessed by the pre-modern "Gothic writers", and a parody that undoes the credibility of this notion. Through investigating the comic elements in Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis's texts, it is then demonstrated that the comic is rendered in different uses according to the epistemological contexts of the texts. Walpole's Otranto adopts mixing the comic within the Gothic context in order to show its stylistic and epistemological connection with Shakespeare who was regarded as the par excellence writer of "genius", but at the same time it opens up a meta-fictional dimension to show that connection is unreliable by ridiculing the imitation of the Gothic Bard. Radcliffe revises the notion of genius according to her critique of sentimentalism and practices the Gothic comic in Udolpho as an emotional buffer to enforce the "explained supernatural", a device highly suggestive of the modern reason. Lewis, acts as a parody of Radcliffe, applies the comic in The Monk to indicate his subversive attitude against the epistemology of genius, showing the irrational quality of the Gothic which had been overshadowed by the Gothic aesthetics.