Encounter the Romantic fantasies of John Keats's nature poetry and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Victorian novels that brought us Jane Eyre, Ebenezer Scrooge and Mr. Hyde, the experiments of Modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and Postmodern transformations by a shifting cast of contemporaries. We'll read these works in the context of imperial expansion and contraction, the crises of world wars, and the civil rights and independence struggles of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Section Comments: Topic: The Gothic Horror Tradition
Equivalent(s): ENGL 514H, ENGL 514W
Attributes: Online (no campus visits), Humanities(Disc), EUNH
Instructors: STAFF
Additional Course Details:
Imaginative portrayals of the supernatural are central to the British literary tradition for the past 200 years. This course focuses on the gothic as a way of understanding the four main literary movements of this period: Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism and Postmodernism. Works include Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and the film 28 Days Later.
We will also read Dracula, short stories by Angela Carter, and poems by D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Seamus Heaney, and watch the films Alien and The Last Wave.
The course is basically a combination of a traditional British survey course (in which you plow through British lit of the last 200 years) and a theme course focused on the history of gothic horror.