This course investigates nineteenth-century gothic and its preoccupation with violence, history, confession, property, kinship, subjectivities, sexuality, and the aristocracy. It will move chronologically, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (both conceived during the same heady weekend in the summer of 1816), passing up through Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, and culminating with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Readings
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
John Polidori, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre
Edgar Allan Poe, Tales
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly and Other Tales
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Assessment
1 essay (possibly in-class), a series of unannounced quizzes, class participation, a final exam.
