17405

WiSe 23/24: HS-Literature and Media: Fin-de-Siècle Monsters

Stephan Karschay

Comments

Uncomfortably situated between two centuries, the fin de siècle is often regarded as being ‘lost in transition’, a liminal period, alternatively interpreted as the tail-end of the Victorian age or as a period foreshadowing the Modernist onslaughts of the early twentieth century. It is certainly no coincidence, then, that the fin de siècle produced some of the most memorable monsters in the history of British literature. After all, the monster is itself a liminal creature, which questions and ultimately disrupts binary categories of thought and experience. In the abhuman shape of the monster, late-Victorian readers were confronted with their own anxieties (and desires) about the future as if ‘in a glass darkly’. The perceived threats of racial degeneration, psychological disintegration, pathological sexualisation and reverse colonisation were all inscribed into the monstrous fictions of the late-Victorian Gothic, producing bodies which can be read as the fin de siècle’s abject others. The atavistic Edward Hyde (in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), the nymphomaniac Helen Vaughan (in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan), and the vampiric Count Dracula (in Bram Stoker’s novel) are monsters that challenge the boundaries of human identity in manifold ways: they are unfathomably ancient beings whose bodies remain conspicuously young and vital; they simultaneously provoke loathing and desire in the reader; they violate the boundaries between man and animal, male and female as well as self and Other and, through their transgressiveness, they pose a terrible danger to the depicted world. In this seminar, we will be interested in the cultural work which fictional monsters perform – both through their textual representation and their critical interpretation. Furthermore, we will investigate the myriad ways in which Gothic fiction presented the bygone past (historical, mythological and anthropological) as a perpetual source of terror for the present as well as the future. We will examine several Gothic monsters and situate them in their relevant cultural contexts so that specific emphasis will be placed on the various discourses which helped to produce the monsters of the fin de siècle (experimental medicine, criminal anthropology, psychology and sexology). Students will also be introduced to a wide range of late-Victorian monsters by other writers than the ones represented through our three set texts (amongst others: Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Marsh, Herbert George Wells and Henri Rider Haggard).

Voraussetzungen

Regelmäßige und aktive Teilnahme, Lektüre aller im Seminar diskutierten Texte, seminarbegleitende Studienleistungen (wie z.B. response paper, Präsentation, Expertengruppe), abschließende Seminararbeit. Die Seminarsprache ist Englisch.

Literaturhinweise

Zur Anschaffung: Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan [1894]. Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). [ISBN: 978-0199538874]

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales [1886], ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). [ISBN: 978-0199536221]

Stoker, Bram. Dracula [1897], ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [ISBN 0199564094]

Zur Einführung geeignet: 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.