- Teacher: Simon Swift
Although “gothic writing” first emerged in English as a recognizable literary genre at the end of the eighteenth century, the anxieties and tensions raised at the end of the nineteenth saw a remarkable rediscovery and twisting of its conventions. Gothic writing, in fact, has to do with a sense of civilization coming to an end, lacking originality, becoming obsolete, and turning back on itself. In this seminar we will examine five texts from the last twelve years of the nineteenth century as examples of gothic writing: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Olalla and “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Reading for form and history, and thinking about the relation between the novel, the story and the idea of “romance,” we will consider a range of issues including personal identity, corruption and infection, decline, the fear of the foreign, animality, ambiguity, perversion, and questions of readability and unreadability.