Postgraduate Course: Gothic (ENLI11083)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course does two things. It examines the conventions of gothic fiction in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and ways of understanding the general aesthetic appeal of the various types of fear, horror, sexual violence and death that they represent. But it also locates particular gothic texts in their particular historical moments to examine the ideological use that can be made of these conventions and the emotional effects that they mediate. The three moments in question are the French Revolution; the political settlement after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815; and the late Victorian period with its particular anxieties around racial degeneration, female emancipation, Irish nationalism and democracy. Over the course of the semester there is an increasing emphasis on texts by Scottish and Irish authors.
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| Course description |
Introduction
1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757); Freud, ¿The Uncanny¿ (1919) in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
2. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) in Four Gothic Novels.
Part I: Sex and Violence after the French Revolution
3. Edmund Burke, extracts (handout) from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790); Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (written 1799, published 1817; Penguin)
4. M.G. Lewis, The Monk (1796) in Four Gothic Novels; S.T. Coleridge, Christabel (written 1800, published 1816; in Norton Anthology of English Literature volume II)
Part II: Post-War Gothic
5. Shelley, Frankenstein (1817) in Four Gothic Novels; Byron, Manfred (1817;
in Norton Anthology of English Literature volume II)
6. Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)
7. Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Part III: Late-Victorian Gothic
8. Sheridan Le Fanu, stories from In a Glass Darkly (1872)
9. R.L. Stevenson, ¿Olalla¿ (1885), ¿The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde¿ (1886) and ¿Markheim¿ (1887) in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford: 2006)
10. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
All the above texts are best read in the Oxford World Classics series (which includes Four Gothic Novels) except where otherwise noted above.
All students who are registered for this course should be aware that some of the novels studied are long, and as many of these as possible should be read before the course commences. This is particularly the case with The Mysteries of Udolpho: you will not have time to read this text between the second seminar and the third.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
Students will be enabled to identify and discuss the temporal and spatial contours of Gothic; the importance of journeys; the implications of Gothic for the construction of gender and the body. Questions of national identity will also be raised in considering Scottish Gothic writing. The course will develop the students' knowledge of the literature of the period in question, with specific regard to a number of major genres and intellectual issues. The course will enhance students' ability to read critically and comparatively and to engage with an area of specialist research not otherwise available to students at Edinburgh.
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Reading List
Some Secondary Reading
Clery, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Duncan, Ian. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality vol.I. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Gibbons, Luke. Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization and Irish Culture. Galway: Arlen House, 2004.
Hogle, Jerrold E. (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s. A Study of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, and Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790¿1827. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995.
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History¿s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.
Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750¿1820: A Genealogy. London: Routledge, 1993.
---. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980.
--- (ed.) A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Robertson, Fiona. Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolfreys (eds.) Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.
Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Sedgewick, Eve Kosovsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. London: Methuen, 1986.
Watt, James. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re)visions: Writing Women as Readers. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Goth |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Robert Irvine
Tel: (0131 6)50 3605
Email: R.P.Irvine@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Nicole Luu
Tel: (0131 6)50 5059
Email: Nicole.Luu@ed.ac.uk |
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