The 18th-century Gothic genre, which embraced the uncanny, the fantastic, the supernatural, and the liminal space between life and death, has enjoyed a prolific and expansive afterlife. This course traces the development of the genre from its 18th-century beginnings in Britain, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), to its prodigious dissemination across literary traditions and artistic mediums throughout the 19th century and beyond.

In this course, we will consider the world of the Gothic by reading some of its prominent manifestations in Russian, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, British, and American literature (all in English translation) and explore the genre’s tropes as they underwent cultural transformations or displayed remarkable tenacity. We will also consider how the world is represented in the Gothic novel through its foreign, exotic, or structurally compromised settings. We will explore the genre by considering some of its recurring figures (portraits, windows) and characters (femmes fatales, vampires, immortals), architectural spaces (castles, mansions, ruins), and motifs (optics, incest, doubling) while also familiarising ourselves with relevant theoretical approaches and cultural-historical contexts.  

A residential study trip will include a visit to Horace Walpole’s Gothic Revival villa, Strawberry Hill and a trip to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.  

Professor: Stiliana Milkova, Professor of Comparative Literature, Oberlin College. Stiliana.Milkova@oberlin.edu