Subject Area: English

This course tracks the cultural history of the gothic genre from the sublime landscapes and haunted castles of Horace Walpole to the Southern inspired excesses of Anne Rice. From its inception the Gothic genre has been a popular and controversial cultural phenomenon, which has dramatised the darker side of the senses and imagination, as well as testing the boundaries of literary taste. In Gothic fiction nothing is ever certain. The domestic and familiar are merely comforting illusions that veil the darker reality of unspoken fears and desires. Home, city, work, identity, sexuality, the body and the mind are all sites that are open to the destabilising play and uncanny effects of the Gothic imagination as this course’s selected texts, films and TV series, which range from the popular to the canonical, exemplify.