Welcome to English 218! In this course, we will read representative texts from the Gothic genre, which abounds with villains, iconoclasts, demons, ghosts, vampires, dungeons, doppelgangers, nightmares, monasteries, subterranean passages, crumbling castles, and scenes of horror. The Gothic novel is a type of prose fiction that emerged in the late eighteenth century with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), and it is associated with the Germanic tribe the Goths and with Gothic architecture; it is also associated with excess, transgression, mystery, magic, Satanism, witchcraft, the irrational, the supernatural, and with inexplicable occurrences or uncanny situations that evoke Freud’s ideas about the unconscious and repressed desire. Notably, Gothic literature by female authors has been read as a challenge to the patriarchy, allowing for the expression of female desire and sexuality in a repressed, male-dominated culture. Beginning with an examination of the medieval connotations of the term “gothic” and its resonances in 18th-,19th- and 20th-century aesthetics, our readings will consider the form, readership, and social vision of various types of gothic literature.
- Teacher: Shoshannah Jones Square