Seminar in 19th-Century Literature: American Gothic

The genre of gothic literature made a quick transition from England to America in the post-Revolutionary era, with their contexts of haunted castles and villainous monks giving way to our Puritan witch hunts and the haunting injustices of chattel slavery and Native eradication. This course seeks to track the evolution of American gothic fiction from early 19thcentury to present. We’ll follow the gothic genre’s winding course in American literature and history through sub-genres such as early urban gothic, Southern gothic, eco-gothic, Black gothic, queer gothic, and many other guises. We’ll mainly study fiction, but also some poetry and, as we move closer to present-day, movies. The course is designed to mix a range of gothic texts with foundational genre theory/criticism and to allow space in the final third of the class for modern/contemporary texts and theories to be determined by student interests and class consensus.

Possible authors: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jordan Peele, and many others!