ENG 462 - Seminar: The Long Eighteenth Century Gothic

Instructor
Vaz Hooper

There’s nothing like reading books we’ve been told we ought not read. That’s essentially the story of the Gothic during its inception. Lambasted by contemporary critics as literature’s illegitimate and sinful child, gothic novels nonetheless sold like hot cakes, and the infection easily spread to poetry and drama. In our seminar, we will trace this phenomenon in England from the 1760s through the Romantic period to study its evolution from bastard child in the eighteenth century to literature worthy of scholarship only in the last 30 years of the twentieth century.