Undergraduate Course: Fiction and the Gothic, 1840-1940 (ENLI10345)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | From Emily Brontë's Yorkshire to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, the Gothic, with its claustrophobic spaces, brooding landscapes, dark secrets, and ghostly visitations, is a privileged site for the negotiation of anxieties surrounding capitalism, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, race, imperialism, and crime. Looking mainly at novels and short stories from the British Isles, but also examining work from the United States, this course will consider what happened to Gothic fiction after the genre's first flowering in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. |
| Course description |
The course will begin with the Victorian Gothic of the mid-nineteenth century, dwell on the fin-de-siècle Gothic of the 1890s and 1900s, and go on to address the convergence of the Gothic with modernism and the emergence of distinctive regional forms of the Gothic in the early decades of the twentieth century. As this course will make clear, the Gothic - whether as a distinct fictional genre or as a repertoire of codes and conventions adaptable to varied narrative registers - forms a crucially important current during this tumultuous period of literary history. The Gothic mode, we will see, functions in fiction as an imaginative solution to, or displacement of, many of the era's most acute historical problems.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | A MINIMUM of three college/university level literature courses at grade B or above (should include no more than one introductory level literature course). Related courses such as civilisation or creative writing are not considered for admissions to this course. Applicants should also note that, as with other popular courses, meeting the minimum does NOT guarantee admission. In making admissions decisions preference will be given to students who achieve above the minimum requirement with the typical visiting student admitted to this course having three to four literature classes at grade A. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 45 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
196 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
2000 word coursework essay (30%) submitted mid-semester;
plus 3000 word final essay submitted during exam period (70%).
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| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- articulate the major generic features of Gothic narrative
- understand how the Gothic form developed in (primarily) British and Irish fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century
- draw on relevant theoretical approaches (including Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, and queer theory) in order to analyse the ways in which Gothic narratives respond to their historical conditions
- appreciate the ways in which different genres interact in fictional texts
- mount a substantial and sustained argument about the Gothic elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction
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Reading List
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847; Norton Critical Editions, 2003/2019)
Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (1872; Oxford World's Classics, 2008)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; Norton Critical Editions, 2007/2019)
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan (1894; Parthian/Library of Wales, 2010)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; Norton Critical Editions, 1997)
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902; Oxford World¿s Classics, 2008)
May Sinclair, selections from Uncanny Stories (1923; Wordsworth Editions, 2006; also available via Learn); Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927; available via Learn)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929; Norton Critical Editions, 2014)
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938; Virago Modern Classics, 2003)
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Penny Fielding
Tel: (0131 6)50 3609
Email: Penny.Fielding@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Lina Gordyshevskaya
Tel:
Email: pgordysh@ed.ac.uk |
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