BRITISH GOTHIC WRITING: 1760-1900

Specific Foundation

Specific Foundation / Core

The course is also offered to exchange programme students.

By the end of the course students will be expected: • To have acquired a deeper knowledge of the history of the Gothic as a literary form and register within nineteenth-century British literature and a theoretical awareness of the literary practice involved in writing within this form; • To have broadened and deepened their critical and theoretical skills in reading and understanding complex texts

This course aims to provide students with an understanding of a significant and influential literary genre within a broad historical context (from the mid-eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century). We will concentrate on classic gothic novels (Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Polidori’s The Vampyre, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) but will also consider gothic features in the literature, culture and art of the period. At the same time we shall explore the genre’s relation to notions of identity, sexuality, gender, power, politics and imperialism. Attention will be given to the specific socio-historical conditions which produced the gothic form as well as to the ways elements of the genre (e.g. the fantastic, its psychological dimension) persisted throughout the nineteenth century, undergoing various transformations. Extracts from filmic adaptations of the said gothic novels will be used to supplement and complement discussion in class. Course description and course syllabus - Weeks 1, 2 Defining the Gothic  The historical, political, and spiritual context  Gothic influences: art, architecture, landscape gardening  Textual characteristics of the gothic; gothic elements, themes, and characters  Gothic partners: the romance and the novel; other genres  Contemporary reception  The development of the gothic: from the eighteenth century to postmodernism  The contemporary context: what is the place of the gothic in today’s world?  Main critical approaches to the gothic & Trott, Nicola “Gothic.” Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Nicholas Roe. OUP, 2005, 483‒491. & Botting, Fred. “Gothic Excess and Transgression,” “Gothic Origins.” Gothic. The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 1996. 1‒28. Weeks 3-6 The Origin of the Gothic KEY TEXT: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) & Botting, Fred. “Gothic Forms.” Gothic. The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 1996. 29‒39. & Chaplin, Sue. “Narrative Instability and the Gothic Narrator.” Gothic Literature: Texts, Contexts, Connections. York Press, 2011. 181‒205. & Chaplin, Sue. “Gothic Bodies.” Gothic Literature: Texts, Contexts, Connections. York Press, 2011. 233‒259. [This contains a section on the double and the Freudian uncanny.] & Smith, Andrew. “Hauntings.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Ed. C. Spooner and E. McEvoy. Routledge, 2007. 147‒153. Weeks 7-10 The Gothic’s Relationship to the Romantic Movement KEY TEXTS:  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818; 1831)  John Polidori, The Vampyre (1819) & Wright, Angela. “Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818).” Mary Shelley. Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions. University of Wales Press, 2018. & Ellis, Markman. “Fictions of Science in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh UP, 2001. 141-160. & Brantlinger, Patrick. “Race and Frankenstein.” The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein. Ed. Andrew Smith. Cambridge University Press, 2016. 128-142. & Mellor, Anne “Possessing Nature . The Female in Frankenstein.” Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. 2nd Ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012 [1996]. 355-368. & Groom, Nick. “The Cultures of Death: Gothic Romanticism, Deathly Words.” The Vampire: A New History. Yale University Press, 2018. 97-112. Weeks 11-13 Victorian Gothicism KEY TEXT: Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) & Warwick, Alexandra. “Victorian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Ed. C. Spooner and E. McEvoy. Routledge, 2007. 29-37. & Literary, scientific and socio-historical contexts for viewing Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Extracts from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Katherine Linehan. New York: W.W. Norton 2003. 124-149. & Garrett, Peter K. “Instabilities of Meaning, Morality, and Narration.” Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Katherine Linehan. New York: W.W. Norton 2003. 189-197.

gothic conventions, romance, history, the uncanny, double, Romantic, Victorian, female gothic

12-12-2021