Course Description

Instructor: Gautam Kundu

From crumbling monasteries and crafty priests, to bleeding nuns and fake hauntings, gothic novels exploded in popularity in late eighteenth century British print culture, featuring wilderness settings, ruined castles, monasteries and mansions, replete with supernatural occurrences and entities, mental illness, young women in distress, heavy with a sense of the uncanny, mystery, fear and terror. But what happens when the strange tropes, figures, and rhetorical techniques of the gothic travel across the Atlantic to adapt to the dark pathologies and monstrous histories of the Americas (from the Indian American Wars to the spectre of slavery)? This course will expand notions of the gothic to frameworks that understand late eighteenth to early nineteenth century gothic literature, and to its more recent and contemporary manifestations as a transatlantic phenomenon.

Books: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Bio: Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA.