GOTHIC, THE LITERATURE OF EXCESS (CL3054)

This course addresses the dark side of the imagination: monsters, vampires, hauntings and demons. It opens students to the history and genealogy of the fascination with excess, the supernatural, and horror, tracing the development of a genre from its 18th- century inception through to its late bloom in the Victorian era; leaving it to students to pursue through their pick of twentieth- and twenty-first gothic. Authors studied include Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, the Marquis de Sade, James Hogg, R.L. Stevenson, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. The course also attends to visual representations of gothic in painting, ballet, television, and film.