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Gothic Fiction

Email course leader: julian.lovelock@buckingham.ac.uk
One term: 15 units

This course is the second part of a 2-term course which provides you with an introduction to literature written between 1789 and 1830, which covers the Romantic period. It aims to examine the roots and generally accepted characteristics of the Romantic movement and to introduce you to a range of texts produced in this period, relating them to an appropriate range of historical, cultural and aesthetic values. This term's work involves a detailed exploration of the gothic genre as a response to the romantic concerns of individuality, creativity and consciousness. It aims to:

• Investigate the contributions made by women writers to the period.
• Place the gothic in its cultural context by focussing upon its attitudes to science, politics and nature.
• Examine the Romantic writer’s continued attraction to extreme states of mind.
• Discuss the gothic as an evolving form that is still in use today.

The course is assessed by a term paper of 2,500 words (50%), and the second half of the 3-hour Spring Term examination in British Romantics and Gothic Fiction (50%).

Authors and set texts currently studied include:

• Walpole, H. The Castle of Otranto.
• Austen, J. Northanger Abbey.
• Shelley, M. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
• Keats, J. Selected poetry (including The Eve of St Agnes).
• Shelley, P.B. Selected poems.
• Short stories by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Anne Radcliffe
• Modern short stories by Iain Banks