The Victorian Gothic

While the eighteenth century is still considered to be the ‘age of reason’, dominated

by neo-classical architecture and rational conversation, in which the Gothic could

only exist as a dark counterpart to mainstream culture (a reductive enough view of

that period), the Victorian Age itself is, to the general public, a Gothic one. The critic

Robert Mighall points out that notions of a barbaric past are crucial to cultural

understandings of Gothic and for this reason it is not surprising that the Victorians

and the Gothic became so closely intertwined to twentieth and twenty-first century

audiences. To us, the Victorian age is the Gothic age. Julian Wolfreys points out that

for the Victorians themselves, the Gothic was literally everywhere: ‘all that black, all

that crepe, all that jet and swirling fog…These and other phenomena, such as the

statuary found in Victorian cemeteries like Highgate are discernible as being

fragments and manifestations of a haunting, and, equally, haunted, “Gothicized”

sensibility’.

The Victorian period was certainly a particularly fertile time and place for the

production of monsters, and these monsters have refused to go away. This one-

semester module will provide an introduction to monstrosity as an important part of

Victorian culture. We will examine versions of the monstrous which emerged in the

Victorian period in a broad historical and cultural context that will allow us to shape

an understanding of how these versions of monstrosity have been remade and

reproduced in subsequent cultural work. Students will also be offered a critical

introduction to the ways in which important developments in literary theory (such as

historical, ideological, theological and material culture debates) have influenced a

modern understanding of the Gothic and will be encouraged to mobilise and

challenge a number of key critical terms and ideas within their textual analysis.

This module will be assessed by one, 5000 word essay.

Students are cautioned that this module involves reading some very long novels.

Dr. Jarlath Killeen

killeej@tcd.ie

Phone extension: 2337

Learning Outcomes:

On successful completion of the module a student should be able to:

1. Trace important continuities as well as distinctions between the ways in

which these texts mobilise Gothic tropes and structures.

2. Recognise definitions of genre and be able to contribute critically to the

debates that have surrounded the extent and the limits of the Gothic.

3. Employ the significant terms, distinguish between the different contexts and

take an active part in debates that have surrounded critical discussions of

Gothic literature.

4. Examine the historical and literary contexts for the production of

monstrosity.

Schedule:

Week One: Introduction.

Week Two: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).

Week Three: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847).

Week Four: George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (1859)

Week Five: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859-60).

Week Six: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (1871-72).

Week Seven: Reading Week

Week Eight: Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

Week Nine: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91).

Week Ten: H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)

Week Eleven: Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).

Week Twelve: Ghost Stories by Dinah Craik, Amelia Edwards, and Rhoda

Broughton (on Blackboard site).

Secondary Reading

Abraham, N., ‘Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology’, Critical

Inquiry 13 (1987): 287-92.

Anolik, Ruth Bienstock and Douglas L. Howard, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social

Constructions in the Literary Imagination (2004)

Aguirre, Manuel, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (1990).

Arata, Stephen D., Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siécle (1996).

Auerbach, Nina, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995).

Bakus, Margot Gayle, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the

Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (1999).

Baldick, Chris, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992).

Baldick, Chris, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth Monstrosity and Nineteenth-century Writing

(1987).

Basham, Diana, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian

Literature and Society (1992).

Beal, Timothy, Religion and Its Monsters. London: Routledge (2002).

Bloom, Clive, ed. Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond (2007).

Blum, Deborah, Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life After

Death (2007).

Botting, Fred, Gothic (1996).

Brantlinger, Patrick, ‘Rule of Darkness’: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-

1914. London: Routledge (1994).

Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (1986).

Briefel, Aviva (2007). ‘The Victorian Literature of Fear’, Literature Compass 4, 2,

508-23.

Bronfen, Elisabeth, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992).

Brooks, Chris, The Gothic Revival (1999).

Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed.

Adam Phillips (1990).

Butler, Marilyn, Romantic, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background

1760-1830 (1981).

Byron, Glennis and David Punter (eds), Spectral Readings (1998).

Carroll, Noel, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990).

Castle, Terry, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of

the Uncanny (1995).

Castricano, Jodey, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing

(2001).

Cavallaro, Dani, The Gothic Vision (2002).

Cixous, Hélène (1976). ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das

Unheimliche. The “Uncanny”’, New Literary History 7, 525-548.

Clery, E. J., ‘The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s’, in Reviewing Romanticism,

eds. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (1992).

Clery, E. J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (1995).

Clery, E. J., Women's Gothic (2000).

Crow, Charles (ed.), American Gothic (1999).

Davenport-Hines, Richard, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin

(1998).

Davison, Carol Margaret, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Fiction (2004).

Day, William Patrick, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy

(1985).

DeLamotte, Eugenia C., Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century

Gothic (1990).

Dickerson, Vanessa D., Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the

Supernatural (1996).

Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siécle

Culture (1986).

Dryden, Linda, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and

Wells (2003).

Duncan, Ian, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott,

Dickens (1992).

Dyer, Richard, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as

Vampirism’, in Susannah Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular

Fiction (1988).

Ellis, Kate Ferguson, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic

Ideology (1987).

Ellis, Markman, The History of Gothic Fiction (2000).

Finucane, R. C., Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (1982).

Fleenor, Juliann E., ed., The Female Gothic (1983).

Frank, Frederick S. (ed.), Gothic Writers (2001).

Freud, Sigmund., ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

Works, Vol. 17, trans James Strachey, London, Tavistock, 1955, pp. 218-56.

Garrett, Peter K., Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

(2003).

Gaull, Marilyn, English Romanticism: The Human Context (1988).

Gelder, Ken, Reading the Vampire (1994).

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1978).

Graham, Kenneth W., (ed.) Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression (1989).

Grimes, Hilary, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny and Scenes of

Writing (2011).

Grixti, Joseph, Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction, (1989).

Grunenberg, Christoph (ed.), Gothic (1997).

Guest, Harriet, ‘The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory after 1760’, in

Beyond Romanticism, eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale (1992).

Haggerty, George E, ‘Fact and Fantasy in the Gothic Novel’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39

(1985): 379-91.

Haggerty, George E., Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (1989).

Haggerty, George E.,Queer Gothic (2006).

Halberstam, Judith,Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters

(1995).

Haslam, Richard, ‘Irish Gothic’, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, Catherine

Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds. (2007).

Heiland, Donna, ‘Gothic and the Generation of Ideas’, Literature Compass 4, 1,

(2007). 48-65.

Heiland, Donna, Gothic and Gender: An Introduction (2004).

Hendershot, Cyndy, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (1984).

Hillis, Matt, The Pleasures of Horror (2005).

Hoevler, Diane Long, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from

Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (1998).

Hogle, Jerrold E. ed., Cambridge Companion to the Gothic (2002).

Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik, eds, Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005).

Houston, Gail Turley, From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics and Victorian

Fiction (2005).

Howard, Jacqueline, Reading Gothic Fiction (1994).

Howells, Coral Ann, ‘The Gothic Way of Death in English Fiction 1790-1820’, British Journal

for Eighteenth-century Studies 5 (1982): 207-15.

Howells, Coral Ann, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978).

Hughes, Winnifred, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (1980).

Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the ‘Fin

de Siécle’ (1996).

Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981).

Jones, Darryl, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (2002).

Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2003).

Kilgour, Maggie, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995).

Kilger, Samuel, The Goths in England: A Study of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century

Thought (1952).

Knelman, Judith, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (1997).

Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (1982).

Leps, Marie-Christine, Apprehending the Criminal: the Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-

century Discourse (1992).

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Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy (2002).

MacAndrew, Elizabeth, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979).

Malchow, H. L., Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1996).

Masse, Michelle A., In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (1992).

McNutt, D. J., The Eighteenth-century Gothic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

and Selected Texts (1975).

Meyers, Helene, Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience (2001).

Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Gothic Fiction (1999).

Milbank, Alison, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction

(1992).

Miles, Robert, Gothic Writing 1750-1820 (1993).

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Century Culture 9, 337-50.

Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (1978).

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Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, David Miller (1983).

Morris, D. B., ‘Gothic Sublimity’, New Literary History 16 (1985): 299-319.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature (1998).

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Decadence (1998).

Norton, Victor (ed.), Gothic Readings : The First Wave, 1764-1840 (2000).

O’ Malley, Patrick, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture

(2006).

Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in

England, 1850-1914 (1985).

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England (1985).

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Modern (2003).

Pearsall, Ronald, The Table-Rappers: The Victorians and the Occult (2004).

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Punter, David (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (2001).

Punter, David., The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present

Day (1980).

Reed, Toni, Demon-Lovers and their Victims in British Fiction (1988).

Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolfreys, eds., Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural

Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (2000).

Roberts, Marie Mulvey, Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy

Cross (1990).

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(1994).

Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny (2003).

Sage, Victor, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (1988).

Sayer, Karen and Rosemary Mitchell, eds, Victorian Gothic (2003).

Schmitt, Canon, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English

Nationality (1997).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

(1985).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986).

Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,

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Showalter, Elaine, ‘Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siecle’, Sex,

Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazel.

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Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1992).

Smajic, Srdjan (2003). ‘The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre

in the Victorian Ghost Story’, English Literary History 70, 983-1002.

Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds, Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of

Genre (2003).

Smith, Andrew, Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the

Nineteenth Century (2000).

Smith, Andrew, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-

de-Siécle (2004).

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Victorian London (1992).

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