Early Gothic Fiction by Women Writers - Einzelansicht

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Dear students, all courses will be taught as online courses with asynchronous access until further notice. Once you have signed on in PULS and have been admitted in PULS, your instructor will email you via PULS to let you know when and how to access the online material (moodle, etc.). Testatsleistungen (course requirements) may be subject to change. Students who cannot (yet) access PULS: Please email your instructor directly. It is possible that classes can be switched to classroom teaching (Präsenzlehre) at some point during the semester. If this happens, your instructor will let you know and classes will take place at the times originally scheduled.

The literature of transgression, deception, despair, and terrors both real and imaginary has proved to be as persistent as its subject-matters. Fomenting around the mid-1700s, Gothic literature has been a cultural mainstay ever since. Whether derided as a subliterary recycling of the same trite formulas over and over or praised for exemplifying the powers of the imagination, whether lambasted for its conservative ideologies or subjected to censorship for its radical ones, the Gothic has kindled responses as contradictory as itself.

In this class, we go back to some of the classics of Gothic fiction from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In these novels, Gothic literature has arguably reached an early peak. Simultaneously, though, each of these works embodies tensions and contradictions of content and form that point to the complexity of the Gothic. We will discuss these complications via topics ranging from the sublime and the Gothic castle to fear, the Gothic heroine, masculinity, and monstrosity. Attempts will be made both to situate the texts in some of the reigning ideologies of their day and to address aspects that have proved influential far beyond the original contexts of the work in question.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford World’s Classics). Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [or previous prints by Oxford]. ISBN: 978-0199537419
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey (Norton Critical Edition). Ed. Susan Fraiman. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004. ISBN: 978-0393978506
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Second Norton Critical Edition). Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2012. ISBN: 978-0393927931

Secondary literature will be provided via Moodle.

I strongly suggest starting to read The Mysteries of Udolpho before the first session (as soon as possible, in fact). The novel is long, complex, and written in a style and vocabulary that might take some getting used to. This will also be the first of the novels we discuss.

Learning Journal with Reading Responses + Short Reflection Paper for 3 Credits or + Term Paper for 6 Credits