Vampires, Zombies, & Other Uncanny Creatures:19th Century Women Writers, Gender, & Pop Culture

3 units

This course will explore popular culture visions and revisions of nineteenth-century novels by women. We will consider the intersections of nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction, media, gender issues, and culture, specifically with regard to the revision of earlier texts in current pop culture. We will read a variety of work from multiple genres in order to familiarize ourselves with the original texts and then to compare and contrast them with their modern-day manifestations. How are nineteenth-century conventions and revolutions constructed and reconstructed for codification, revision, or subversion, and what do these reifications and/or revisions reveal about modern-day concepts of gender? How do these media represent, revise, subvert, and re-conventionalize sex and sexuality? How and why are high culture and low culture mixed in both nineteenth-century and contemporary texts and othermedia? What is accomplished by the current zombification of nineteenth-century texts?