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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures : English Literature

Postgraduate Course: Fiction and the Gothic, 1840-1940 (Level 11) (ENLI11191)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Literatures, Languages and Cultures CollegeCollege of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) AvailabilityAvailable to all students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
SummaryFrom 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. 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.

*This course is taught jointly with undergraduate students and consequently postgraduate places are limited
Course description 1. Introduction: Locating the Gothic
2. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
3. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (1872)
4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
5. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan (1894)
6. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
7. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902)
8. May Sinclair, selections from Uncanny Stories (1923); Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' (1927)
9. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
10. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements None
Information for Visiting Students
Pre-requisitesNone
High Demand Course? Yes
Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. articulate the major generic features of Gothic narrative
  2. understand how the Gothic form developed in (primarily) British and Irish fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century
  3. 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
  4. appreciate the ways in which different genres interact in fictional texts
  5. mount a substantial and sustained argument about the Gothic elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction
Reading List
None
Additional Information
Graduate Attributes and Skills Not entered
Special Arrangements Jointly taught with ENLI10345.
KeywordsFatG
Contacts
Course organiserDr Paul Crosthwaite
Tel: (0131 6)50 3614
Email: pcrosthw@exseed.ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMiss Kara McCormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: Kara.McCormack@ed.ac.uk
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