What makes something, or someone, a monster?  To answer this question, this course will examine different figures of horror—from medieval monsters and the villains in the 18th-century Gothic novel to the weird abstractions from the Cthulhu Mythos and beyond.  We will explore why the monster is such a malleable yet enduring cultural hallmark, and study how these shadowy figures have been deployed by writers as vehicles for negotiating a variety of cultural anxieties: contested concepts such as race, gender, religion, and scientific progress.

Throughout the semester, we will read a variety of texts that contain elements of terror—the gothic, the supernatural, the macabre, and the weird—to see how they engage with social apprehensions of their times.  We will also investigate how the writers of these works exploit the powerful emotion of fear through well-known tropes such as monsters, hauntings, and the ineffable.  The “horrid” texts that we will likely read range from the Old English epic poem Beowulf to Ann Radcliffe’s Romantic novel, A Sicilian Romance, and short stories by the American writers Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.