This course is an introduction to Gothic literature and further stretches to Victorian Gothic to reach the Fin de siècle. Developing from Romance 'haunted' The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole and the first wave of Gothicists (Matthew Lewis's The Monk, William Beckford's Vathek, and Ann Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho to well articulated Gothic novels such as those of Shelley's Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula to Late Victorian Gothic novelists such as Oscar Wilde and his The Picture of Dorian Gray. The course will highlight the elements of Gothic fiction.
This course is historicist in essence, and does not necessarily embrace the Gothic in all the previous cited novels. Nevertheless, we will try to explore the socio-economic and political structures behind the Novel. Freudian psychology will certainly help to shed light on the Oedipal knot, psychological structures of the unconscious, and the development of the Self. Other themes will rise notably the woman's condition, and what is commonly known as protofeminism. Students should make out that the Gothic is also a project of/for modernity.
- Teacher: Azzeddine BOUHASSOUN