SNRSCH1516 - ENG 3231 - Restoration and 18th Century Literature: Trans-Atlantic Gothic Fiction in English

Course Description

This course is designated as a pre-1800 literature course. Among the many wonderful things to come out of eighteenth century Britain, along with periodicals, coffeehouses, and feminism, is the Gothic as a literary mode. In our seminar, we’ll think about the origins and legacies of the Gothic from one of its founding moments—Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)—to one of its most profound recent examples—Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988). Along the way, we’ll consider the Gothic’s literary dynamics and political implications, from its figuration of the desires that emerge with the French Revolution in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Mary Shelley’s revision of her father’s political philosophy and her equally famous mother’s gender politics in Frankenstein (1818) to its inscription of struggles over American identity in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” (1843), and Hannah Craft’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, written c. 1853-61 but not published until 2002. (As we’ll see the found manuscript is itself a Gothic trope.) Assignments will include a group presentation, a response to another group’s presentation, a brief close reading essay, and a brief research paper or pedagogical portfolio detailing how you would introduce high school students to the Gothic.