Browse Hierarchy ESH264: Terror, Transgression and Astonishment: the Gothic in the Long Nineteenth Century

Why do writers so often find themselves compelled to write about the gruesome, sordid, creepy, or just terrifying? This module addresses this question by tracing such subject matter from the emergence of Gothic fiction in the late eighteenth century (the beginning of our "long" nineteenth century) to such nineteenth-century genres as the ghost story and the supernatural. (We will also look at some texts that are unclassifiably weird.) In doing this, we will see how the Gothic and related genres arise in relation to cultural and social trends such as the enlightenment, the advent of Republican government in United States, and shifting understandings of the family and sexuality.