Gothic Literature I & II

Gothic Literature I: The European Tradition

This course explores the origins of Gothic Literature, the European traditions it arose from, and the literary devices it utilizes to achieve its powerful effect. Besides looking at the contemporary literary criticism on the subject, we will read many of the great founders of this tradition: Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Clara Reeve, Anne Radcliffe, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley.

 Gothic Literature II: American Gothic

In this class, we will turn our gaze from Gothic Literature’s origins in Europe, to its journey across the Atlantic  to the United States. Gothic Literature, arriving at first in New England, and then spreading into the American South, carries on many of the major devices and tools of its European counterpart while expanding and adding its own, unique essence to the tradition.

The study here is two fold: First, students will be introduced to the “New England Gothic,” often known as the ‘Dark Romantics,’ and begin to ask questions such as: “What becomes of Gothic Literature once it reaches the shores of North America?” “How is the Dark Romantic Tradition keeping the European Gothic tradition alive? How is it transforming it?” Secondly, students will be introduced to a distinctive transformation within the Gothic Canon:  America’s “Southern Gothic Tradition,” a world filled with wandering, isolated  highways, conservative Christian values, and serial killers more Christ-like than they are infernal. Among the authors we will look at are: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe,  Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor.

Course information:

• Each course stands alone, and may be taken separately.
• Self-study courses are self-evaluated.
• All literature available in the public domain will be provided on our teaching website. Students will need to purchase the books noted under the Syllabus tab.
• There are no prerequisite courses for either course.

Languages:The course and bibliography is in English. Our English proficiency requirements apply to this course. This prerequisite also continues to apply to students whose native language is neither English nor Greek. Please click here for details regarding language requirements.

Gothic Literature I: The European Tradition

Required Coursebooks:

Fred Botting: The Gothic

Jerrold Hogle: The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction 

• We begin with a week of theory and brainstorming on the concept of “The Gothic,” setting the foundations for academic study and reflection.

• In the second week we will begin the first reading of Gothic Literature, the first Gothic novel,  and students begin to see how the genre is created.

• Week Three is where the Gothic begins to get its “legs,” with Reeve picking up Walpole’s formula, and setting the stage for a real departure from Romanticism into the birth of this new genre.

• In week Four, students enter a rich and complex world, filled with folklore and stories from another time and culture, and the stage is also set for the deeply personal aspects of the Gothic, which enter into the author’s thought-world.

• By Week Five, the Gothic genre becomes fully established in The Monk. Students by this point will be able to see the foundational elements all culminating in this great, horrifying, work.

• Week Six gives students two new challenges. First, Radcliffe’s contribution to the Gothic genre adds a distinct early feminist voice. Students will be challenged by this new criticism. Radcliffe is following a “formula” (as were many writers at the time) on “the Gothic.” The second question now becomes: “Has the Gothic already died, now that it is so clearly defined and repeatable?”

• Although we won’t go too deeply into Vampires in this class, Week Seven will show how late-Romantic and early-Victorian sensibilities and literary conventions, gave rise to something more than a dead body crawling from out of a grave.

• Finally, in Week Eight, as students are handing in their term paper, they will also be reading what is often considered the “Masterpiece of Gothic Literature,” a book that asks more questions and creates more areas of investigation and inquiry, which widens the study and literary of canon of, “the Gothic,” than any book before it. In many ways, the class ends on a beginning, not on a conclusion.

Gothic Literature II: American Gothic

• In this course students will begin reading American Gothic stories right from the start. Some emphasis will be given as to the influence of the European tradition, but mostly, students will look at the American tradition from its own standing, its own being, one rooted in the haunted New England landscape, empowered by a growing fascination with Occultism. 
• Week Two brings students to one of America’s most Gothic and haunted places, Salem, Massachusetts, and to its most famous writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Students will see how Hawthorne uses the Gothic tradition to also develop two distinct literary genres of his own: Short Fiction and Dark Romanticism. Emphasis will be given to Hawthorne’s “changing of the rules,” and his “debt to England.” 
• Week Three offers students the image of the Gothic master personified: Edgar Allen Poe. Students will examine Poe’s poetry, verse, literary criticism, and his living of the “real” Gothic life. 
• Week Four will bring students to their final New England author, Herman Melville. Melville’s works depart significantly from the previous American Gothic authors in that his writing looks deeper at the lived New England experience. Emphasis will be given on the relationship between the “lived experience” and “the literary experience.” If Melville is successful, the two are inseparable, and he sets the stage for the Southern Gothic writers that follow. 
• In Week Five students take an 180 degree turn, and leave the scenic paths and romantic forests of New England for the hidden roads and empty countryside of America’s South, a land filled with mountain lore, conservative Christian values, and a culture suffering from a lose of identity following the American Civil War. Picking up the Gothic in this environment, Flannery O’Connor, the “mother of the Southern Gothic,” brings readers into her world of theology and murder. 
• Week Six shows students the virtual explosion of Southern Gothic Literature. Students will pay special notice to the new conventions and innovations that Southern Gothic authors bring to the genre. 
• In Week Seven, students are introduced to the writings of Eudora Welty. Welty’s Southern Gothic is less violent, less haunted, and returns to the reader in many ways to the awe and fascination with nature, which the European Gothic founders first addressed in their stories. Students write will be reading Welty and discussing whether or not the Gothic has gone “full circle.” 
• While students write their final papers this week, they also return to New England, to one of America’s greatest authors, H.P. Lovecraft, who reinvents the Gothic tradition in many ways with his interests in science, occultism, and horror. In many ways, Lovecraft contributes to the American Gothic what Shelly’s Frankenstein contributed to the English Gothic: a summary, an innovation, and a departure point for new inquiry into “The Gothic.”