Department of English

On the one hand, Gothic fiction unveils a hidden world of transgression, sexual perversion, irrational and violent actions, death and insanity. On the other hand it was a socially conservative, middle-class genre, shoring up Protestant, bourgeois virtues. This course will examine the contradictions in the development of Gothic fiction. We will look at its growth as a popular form in the second half of the 18th Century, its revolutionary form in the 1790s, and its new departures in the first decades of the 19th century. Throughout we will look at some recurrent concerns of Gothic fiction: the body, the unconscious, doubles and fragmentation. Texts to be studies include: Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis, The Monk, Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Austen, Northanger Abbey, Godwin, Caleb Williams, Shelley, Frankenstein