Gothic Fictions

Catalog description

With its pseudo-medieval tropes of ruined castles, dark dungeons, sadistic villains, and threatened heroines set in non-English settings, the gothic was the antithesis of Enlightenment rationalism and the locus of English cultural fears and desires. Focusing primarily on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British texts from the 1790s gothic heyday, this course will explore the historic development of gothic literature through different genres (the novel, poetry, drama, film) and forms (horror gothic, terror gothic, female gothic, queer gothic, orientalist gothic) into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including American gothic, postcolonial gothic, and horror.