The Victorian Gothic

While the eighteenth century is still considered to be the age of reason, dominated by neo-classical architecture and rational conversation, in which the Gothic could only exist as a dark counterpart to mainstream culture (a reductive view of the eighteenth century), the Victorian Age itself is, to the general public, a Gothic one. The critic Robert Mighall points out that notions of a barbaric past are crucial to cultural understandings of Gothic and for this reason it is not surprising that the Victorians and the Gothic have become so closely intertwined to twentieth and twenty-first century audiences. To us, the Victorian age is the Gothic age. Julian Wolfreys claims that for the Victorians, the Gothic was literally everywhere: ?all that black, all that crepe, all that jet and swirling fog?These and other phenomena, such as the statuary found in Victorian cemeteries like Highgate are discernible as being fragments and manifestations of a haunting, and, equally, haunted, ?Gothicized? sensibility? (2002, 25). The Victorian period was a particularly fertile time and place for the production of monsters, and these monsters have refused to go away. This one-semester module will provide an introduction to monstrosity as an essential part of Victorian culture. We will analyze versions of the monstrous which emerged in the nineteenth century in a broad historical and cultural context that will allow us to shape an understanding of how these versions of monstrosity have been remade and reproduced in subsequent cultural work. Students will also be offered a critical introduction to the way that important developments in literary theory (such as historical, postcolonial and feminist debates) have influenced a modern understanding of the Gothic and will be encouraged to mobilise a number of key critical terms within their textual analysis. Religion and religious controversy will be of particular interest and the complex relationship between discourses of faith and the Gothic will be examined throughout the module.