The fears of the Victorians seem uncannily like our own. Like many
Americans today, ordinary Victorians feared Darwin, death, sex, and the
future. The seminar will study both realistic and Gothic fiction to
isolate the threat within even the obligatory happy endings. Some works we
shall read are Dickens, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol; Darwin, On the
Origin of Species; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss or Daniel Deronda;
and Bram Stoker, Dracula; along with sundry ghost stories and poems.