Five Gothic Novels
Instructor: Dr Veronika Ruttkay
Email: ruttkayveron@gmail.com
Office hour: Fri 10h-11h R5 347
Wed 13:00-14:30
R5 414
Course Schedule
Week 1
(4 Mar)
Introduction
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto/1
Week 2
(11 Mar)
Week 3
(18 Mar)
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto/2
Gothic in the 1790s: Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis (lecture)
Week 4
(25 Mar)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein/1
Week 5
(1 Apr)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein/2
Week 6
(15 Apr)
Science and the gothic (lecture)
Week 7
(22 Apr)
R. L. Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Week 8
(29 Apr)
Bram Stoker: Dracula/1
Week 9
(6 May)
Bram Stoker: Dracula/2
Week 10
(13 May)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw/1
+1
(20 May)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw/2
Assessment:
Students have a choice between
a)
writing a home essay (6-8 pages, Times New Roman, 12p, double spaced), giving a short presentation
(about 15 mins), and participating regularly in classroom work
b)
taking an exam for which familiarity with the five novels and the additional critical texts is necessary
Required secondary reading for the exam (tentative list, to be finalized in May):
Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’, in David Punter, ed., A
Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 293-304
Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, ‘The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel’, PMLA, Vol 9, No 2
(1981), 255-270
Marshall Brown, ‘Frankenstein ’, in The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 183-208
Marilyn Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), xi-li
Anne Stiles, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and the Double Brain’, SEL 46, 4 (Autumn 2006), 879-900
Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, Literature and
Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise, 94-207
Recommended reading
Stevens, David, The Gothic Tradition, Cambridge Contexts in Literature, series editor Adrian Barlow (Cambridge: CUP,
2000) FszEK
Ellis, Markman, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000) OIK
Hogle, Jerrold E., The Cambridge companion to gothic fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 2002) MTAK
Howard, Jacqueline, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) MTAK
Garrett, Peter K., Gothic reflections: Narrative force in nineteenth-century fiction (Ithaca: Cornell, 2003) MTAK
Gamer, Michael, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, reception, and canon formation (Cambridge: CUP, 2002) MTAK
Bennett, Betty T., and Stuart Curran, eds., Mary Shelley in Her Times (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000) FSzEK
Leask, Nigel, “Shelley’s ‘Magnetic Ladies’: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body”, in Stephen Copley and
John Whale, eds., Beyond Romanticism: New approaches to texts and contexts 1780-1832 (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992) 53-78 – SEAS
Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) SEAS
Web Links:
http://graduate.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/title.html
http://www.litgothic.com/index_fl.html
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_2/resources.htm
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/small/exhibits/gothic/index.html