Gothic Romance 1764-Present

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Professor Roger Luckhurst
• Assessment: a 2500-word coursework essay (100%)

You're just off to a joyous wedding in your castle when the bridegroom is crushed to death by the sudden appearance of a gigantic, spectral knight's helmet. Unlucky. It could have happened to anyone. What follows is worse: portraits come alive, giant dismembered limbs wriggle in corridors, virgins are menaced, and the castle walls begin to crumble.

This is a rough outline of the short, disordered book by Horace Walpole called The Castle of Otranto, widely considered to be the founding text of the Gothic romance. The book has spawned a host of dreamlike imitators full of supernatural events, unnerving experiences in dungeons, scary nuns, vampires, ghosts and the occasional appearance of transdimensional squids.

We will track this tradition from its origins in Walpole's boutique castle at Strawberry Hill on the Thames through the nineteenth century and watch it transmogrify into modern horror in the twentieth century. If you enjoy horror, or just want to find out why the hell anyone would enjoy this stuff, this could be the module for you.

Indicative syllabus

• Eighteenth-century origins: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; the ‘Graveyard Poets’; Anne Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest
• Early nineteenth century: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Gothic Revival architecture through John Ruskin’s ‘On the Nature of the Gothic’; haunted house short stories by Balzac and Bulwer-Lytton
• Late Victorian Gothic: Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
• The American twentieth century: H.P. Lovecraft stories, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘The Color Out of Space’; the birth of ‘horror’ cinema - Frankenstein (1932) and a comparison with the modern horror film Get Out (2016)
• The Christmas ghost story tradition: Dickens, ‘The Signal-Man’; M.R. James, ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’; modern TV adaptations

By the end of this module, you will have:

• an understanding of 'the Gothic'
• used 'the Gothic' critically in contexts of different epochs, cultural traditions and artistic forms
• explored why cultivating feelings of horror and terror can produce pleasure
• learnt the best ways of neutralising the threat of vampires, werewolves and transdimensional squids.