Fiction and the Gothic, 1840-1940

From Emily Brontė'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-sičcle 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. Credit Level: 10 Year taken: Year 3 Undergraduate