Postgraduate Course: Fiction and the Gothic, 1840-1940 (Level 11) (ENLI11191)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | From Emily Brontė's Yorkshire to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, the Gothic, with its claustrophobic spaces, brooding landscapes, dark secrets, and ghostly visitations, is a privileged site for the negotiation of anxieties surrounding capitalism, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, race, imperialism, and crime. Looking mainly at novels and short stories from the British Isles, but also examining work from the United States, this course will consider what happened to Gothic fiction after the genre's first flowering in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The course will begin with the Victorian Gothic of the mid-nineteenth century, dwell on the fin-de-sičcle Gothic of the 1890s and 1900s, and go on to address the convergence of the Gothic with modernism and the emergence of distinctive regional forms of the Gothic in the early decades of the twentieth century. As this course will make clear, the Gothic - whether as a distinct fictional genre or as a repertoire of codes and conventions adaptable to varied narrative registers - forms a crucially important current during this tumultuous period of literary history. The Gothic mode, we will see, functions in fiction as an imaginative solution to, or displacement of, many of the era's most acute historical problems.
*This course is taught jointly with undergraduate students and consequently postgraduate places are limited |
| Course description |
1. Introduction: Locating the Gothic
2. Emily Brontė, Wuthering Heights (1847)
3. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (1872)
4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
5. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan (1894)
6. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
7. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902)
8. May Sinclair, selections from Uncanny Stories (1923); Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' (1927)
9. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
10. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- articulate the major generic features of Gothic narrative
- understand how the Gothic form developed in (primarily) British and Irish fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century
- draw on relevant theoretical approaches (including Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, and queer theory) in order to analyse the ways in which Gothic narratives respond to their historical conditions
- appreciate the ways in which different genres interact in fictional texts
- mount a substantial and sustained argument about the Gothic elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
Jointly taught with ENLI10345. |
| Keywords | FatG |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Paul Crosthwaite
Tel: (0131 6)50 3614
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Sophie Bryan
Tel: (0131 6)51 1764
Email: |
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