E1 05/27-07/03 08620 ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS ROSENTHAL
Horror and Hilarity: Dark Pleasure in 19th c. British and American Gothic Literature
This course will explore an array of 19th c. British and American texts that can be classified as gothic: stories of monsters, violence, insanity, dread, and the supernatural. The texts in this course will primarily be composed of novellas, short-stories, plays, and a smattering of poetry. We will read iconic and lesser-known works to better understand how the genre changed over the course of the 19th c. in response to issues of empire, gender, race, and disability, all of which helped to shape the transatlantic literary imagination. In doing so, we will trace the affects of horror and hilarity and explore how these seemingly antithetical readerly responses are more compatible than one might expect.
Works by the following authors may appear in this course’s syllabus: Monk Lewis, Richard Brinsley Peake, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Tennyson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The major assignments of the course will be a short paper, a long paper, and a final exam.