Fall 2006 Courses

English 330-01: The Romantic Period: Gothic Literature in Britain, 1765-1847 (Çelikkol)

M/W/F 2:20-3:20pm, OM 111

Haunted castles, stormy nights, and flickering candles: elements of the Gothic, a genre established in the late eighteenth century, are familiar to us.  In this course, turning back to the period in which the Gothic was first established and became popular, we will read novels and poems featuring ghosts, vampires, monsters, and snake-women, and link these representations to larger questions about gender, science, philosophy, sexuality, and nationhood.  Why was the Gothic novel perceived to be a genre produced by and for women?  How does the Gothic represent foreignness?  Which anxiety-provoking historical changes underlie literary representations of ghosts and vampires?  What are the different kinds of physical and ideological boundaries that the Gothic imagination blurs? 

To answer these questions, we will read not only classics such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otronto and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but also literary reviews and philosophical treatises published circa 1800.  The reading list for the course includes Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, John Polidori’s The Vampyre, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as well as poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Joanna Baillie, and Lord Byron.  We will also briefly investigate the antithesis between realism and the Gothic as we read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.    

Students will write three formal papers—one of which will involve independent research—as well as a few informal responses.  They will also prepare a formal presentation on a topic of their own choice and a brief informal presentation on an assigned essay in literary criticism.

Fall 2006 Course Listings