Dr. Castellano 3 credits

          Beginning with Walpole’s classic story The Castle of Otranto, this course will examine how the Gothic novel, with its monsters, ghosts, and supernatural phenomena, constructs a counter-narrative to Enlightenment rationality and socio-economic progress. Gothic writers were called “terrorists,” and their works often imagine that a racialized or sexualized “other” threatens the moral and physical boundaries of the proper British citizen. At the same time, women writers adopt the Gothic mode: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley’s “female gothic” texts identify unspeakable crimes and sexual desires. These texts question, moreover, the knowledge that is situated within masculine rationality and science. Finally, we will read later nineteenth-century texts from male writers, including The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula. These texts insist that the terrifying “other” already exists within national and even bodily boundaries, a theme that allows for confessions of fin-de-siècle decadence, including opium addiction and “deviant” sexual practices. Our readings of these primary texts will be supplemented by feminist and queer theoretical readings of the novels. 

Required Course Texts:
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (Oxford Classics, 9780192834409)
Mary Wollstonecraft: Maria: Or, the Wrongs of Woman (Norton, 0393311694)
Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (Longman Cultural, 0321202082)
Thomas DeQuincey: Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Penguin, 9780140439014)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (Norton Critical, 0393964582)
Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau (Penguin, 978-0141441023)
Oscar Wilde: Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford, 9780192807298)
Bram Stoker: Dracula  (Norton Critical, 978-0393970128)

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