London Gothic

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

If you walk the streets of central London today, you're likely to cross paths with a Ghost Tour Bus or banners for the London Dungeon. These tourist traps have a long history connected to London's literary and visual past. This course will trace London's contemporary Gothic features back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic movements, beginning with Horace Walpole, John Ruskin, and Ann Radcliffe. Students will then assess the Victorian origins of gender-based crime stories by reading Elizabeth Gaskell and Arthur Conan Doyle, critically examine London's past as a port city for the slave trade through studying Mary Prince and engaging with archival materials, explore monstrous London with Bram Stoker, and consider global dimensions of the Gothic in contemporary stories by Helen Oyeyemi and Krystal Sutherland. Along the way, students will build a vocabulary to discuss the Gothic both as a literary genre and as an aesthetic movement. In each unit, students will not only read London's literature but also explore areas of the city through class trips and independent assignments, culminating in an independent research project. Students may also have the option to visit Edinburgh for a weekend and compare both cities' vision of the Gothic. By the end of the course, students will be able to articulate a history of Gothic literature, analyze contemporary displays and experiences of Gothic sights around London, and evaluate and respond to ongoing issues of preserving and retelling London's Gothic past.