Erste Sitzung: 18. Oktober 2017
Die Anmeldung findet im Rahmen des allgemeinen Verfahrens der Fachrichtung Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglophone Kulturen statt. Bitte beachten Sie die Mitteilungen auf der Website der Fachrichtung und die Aushänge.
The vogue for ‘Gothic’ fiction began with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and truly exploded in the 1790s. The genre appealed to its readership who relished the plots featuring settings - ancient castles, eerie vaults and gruesome dungeons – and characters haunted by monsters, supernatural creatures and/or their very personal spectres of the past.
This seminar will introduce you to some of the key texts of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British gothic fiction. Taking our cue from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, we will work our way to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which we will read in parts. We will then go on to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which many critics and readers have considered to be ”the archetype of the horror Gothic” ever since its first publication.[1] Finally, we will focus on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in which elements of the gothic, science-fiction and dystopian narrative blend into a gripping story of scientific hubris, murder and revenge. We will carefully contextualise our readings and examine them against the backdrop of social and cultural changes occurring on the British Isles, as well as major political upheavals on the European continent. We will explore some of the literary traditions which were highly influential in the emergence of British gothic fiction. We will also trace the recurring motifs and concerns that are at the heart of these texts, ranging from religion, emerging scientific and national discourses to ongoing debates about female and male gothic which tie in with questions of gender, sexuality and violence.
Texts (please buy no others than the editions below, since you will need editions with a scholarly introduction and identical pagination to join the discussions in class):
Lewis, M. G. The Monk. [1796]. Ed. Christopher MacLachlan. London: Penguin, 1998. ISBN: 978-0140436037
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. [1818/1831]. Ed. Maurice Hindle. Revised and updated edition. London: Penguin, 2003. ISBN: 978-0141439471
Additional texts and excerpts will be provided in form of a reader at the beginning of semester.
[1] Hogle, Jerrold E. ”Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. J. E. H. Cambridge: CUP, 2002. 8. |
