Spring 2021 Special Topic

Two hundred years of Gothic fiction (with a dash of drama, poetry and cinema).  The Gothic literature craze crested early in the 19C, but the works best known to us came after that time, as thoughtful variations on the genre.  This course will look at a two or three flagship works of 19C gothic, before going on to consider how the form evolved and ramified in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Our starting point will be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and our likely terminus Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019).  In between, we will read an assortment of long and short works by British and American authors, among whom may be Charlotte or Emily Bronte, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Steven King, and a host of less familiar names worth getting to know. 

This course will satisfy a Post-1800 Literature requirement for English Department majors. 

This course satisfies the HUMA requirement in Discovery.