Gothic Literature V41.9056.001
Credits: 4
Professor(s): Professor C Bloom
Syllabus: Download
* This course does not count towards English major requirements *
On Christmas Day, 1764 Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, the very first Gothic novel. The Gothic flourished especially in the nineteenth century, creating a whole vocabulary of new creatures and landscapes and two of the great books of the genre: Frankenstein And Dracula. This course concentrates on the great works of Gothic which are central to an understanding of literature, film, early Romanticism and popular culture. Specialising on the works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we will also explore how those texts were reinvented for film and what new elements were added in the twentieth century.
Using a selection of texts and using a variety of approaches from the historical to the post modern and the feminist to queer theory we will explore the multifarious levels of meaning in Gothic texts as well as looking at narrative strategies and a variety of themes including the political and revolutionary, the erotic and the exotic, the Promethian and the undead, the role of religion, the role of women, the Wandering Jew and the ‘mock’ medieval.