WiSe 23/24: S-Culture-Gender-Media: Lit.-Stud.: Nineteenth-Century Gothic from The Monk to Dracula
Stephan Karschay
Comments
The Romantic period (c.1780 to c.1830) witnessed the Gothic’s first apex of popularity as a literary mode, neatly encapsulated in the phrase ‘Dark Romanticism’. However, this dark mode of storytelling was antithetically received by critics and the common reader: reviled by the former as dangerous for its emotional immediacy, the Gothic was devoured by the latter for producing delightful frights at a distance. As early as 1764, Horace Walpole had established many of the Gothic’s tropes and stock features with The Castle of Otranto (subtitled A Gothic Story). As an anonymous critic disdainfully noted, the readers of Gothic fiction could be certain to find the staple ingredients of the genre in any newly published Gothic romance: “An old castle, half of it in ruins. A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones. Three murdered bodies, quite fresh. As many skeletons, in chests and presses”. Yet it is only for the first wave of Gothic fiction that such a catalogue of fixed generic conventions can be formulated. During the Victorian period, the Gothic genre transformed itself into a mode that seeped into a wide range of literary texts (such as detective fiction, the ghost story and the sensation novel) and cultural phenomena (such as magic lantern shows and ‘spirit’ photography). One of the most potent sources of anxiety to fuel the Gothic in the course of the nineteenth century was Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Darwin’s uncomfortable claim that humanity shared a common ancestor with other mammals dovetailed with the even more disquieting suggestion that humanity would not necessarily evolve further but might under certain conditions regress to a less developed version of itself. It is certainly no coincidence, then, that authors writing in Darwin’s wake produced some of the most memorable Gothic fictions in the history of British literature. In this seminar, we will read a wide range of Gothic fictions, beginning with Matthew Lewis’s scandalising bestseller The Monk (1796) and concluding with Bram Stoker’s vampire classic Dracula (1897). These novels will be situated in their relevant historical contexts, and we will pay close attention to the Gothic’s permutations throughout the century. Further primary texts will be announced in our first session.
Voraussetzungen
Regelmäßige und aktive Teilnahme, Lektüre aller im Seminar diskutierten Texte, seminarbegleitende Studienleistungen (wie z.B. response paper, Gruppenpräsentation, Expertengruppe), abschließende Seminararbeit. Die Seminarsprache ist Englisch.
Literaturhinweise
Zur Anschaffung:
Lewis, Matthew. The Monk [1796], ed. Nick Groom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[ISBN 9780198704454]
Stoker, Bram. Dracula [1897], ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).[ISBN 0199564094]
Zur Einführung geeignet:
Botting, Fred. “Gothic Writing in the 1790s” and “Romantic Transformations.” Gothic. London: Routledge, 2014. 57-103. Print. [Second edition, The New Critical Idiom Series] Byron, Glennis. “Gothic in the 1890s.” A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 132-42.
Halberstam, Judith [Jack]. “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”, in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 1-27.
Zur Vertiefung während des Seminars: Botting, Fred. Gothic (London: Routledge, 2014). [Second edition, The New Critical Idiom Series]
Karschay, Stephan. Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares [1999] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
A list with further reading will be provided at the beginning of term.
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Regular appointments