Early British Gothic Novel
Autumn 2007
(A Tentative Syllabus)
Teacher: 林明澤
Classroom: 修齊大樓 26510 室
Office: 修齊大樓 26640 室
Phone number: 2757575 ext. 52248
E-mail Address: linmt@mail.ncku.edu.tw.
II. Class Hours:
09:10~12:00 on every Wednesday
III. Class Schedule:
I.
Sept. 19th
Introduction to the Course
Sept. 26th
What is the “Gothic”?
David Punter, “The Origins of Gothic Fiction” (pp. 22~60)
Fred Botting, Gothic (pp. 1~43)
Oct. 3rd
Oct. 10th
Oct. 17th
Oct. 24th
Oct. 31st
Frances A. Chiu, “‘Dark and dangerous designs’: Tales of Oppression,
Dispossession, and Repossession, 1770-1800”
Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic”
The Founding Father and Mother, so to speak
(Holiday)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Carol M. Dole, “Three Tyrants in The Castle of Otranto”
Raymond Bentman, “Horace Walpole’s Forbidden Passion”
Marcie Frank. “Horace Walpole’s Family Romance”
Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother
Paul Baines, “‘This Monstrous Theatre of Guilt’”
Clara Reeve, The Champion of Virtue
Kate Ferguson Ellis, “Otranto Feminized”
Terror vs. Horror: an Ethic/Aesthetic Duel
Sophia Lee, The Recess
Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, “The Female Gothic: Then and
Now”
Megan Lynn Isaac, “Sophia Lee and the Gothic of Female
Community”
Nov. 7th
Nov. 14th
(First Short Response Paper Due)
The Recess (Continued)
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, “‘Ev’ry Lost Relation’: Historical Fictions and
Sentimental Incidents in Sophia Lee’s The Recess”
Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk
Peter Brooks, “Virtue and Terror”
Nov. 21st
Nov. 28th
Dec. 5th
Dec. 12th
Peter Grudin, “The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit”
The Monk (continued)
Wendy Jones, “Stories of Desire in The Monk”
D. L. MacDonald, “The Erotic Sublime: The Marvelous in The Monk”
The Monk (continued)
Lisa Naomi Mulman, “Sexuality on the Surface”
Lauren Fitzgerald, “The Sexuality of Authorship in The Monk”
Ann Radcliff, The Italian
Diego Saglia, “Looking At The Other: Cultural Difference and the
Traveller’s Gaze in The Italian”
Brenda Tooley, “Gothic Utopia”
The Italian (continued)
Cannon Schmitt, “Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality”
Gary Gautier, “Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian in Context”
Dec. 19th
Dec. 26th
Jan. 2nd
Jan. 9th
Jan. 21st
Revision and Addition
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Bette B. Roberts, “The Horrid Novels”
Mary Waldron, “Early Experiments and ‘Northanger Abbey’”
(Second Short Response Paper Due)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother”
Frankenstein (Continued)
Lee E. Heller, “Frankenstein and the Cultural Uses of Gothic”
John Polidori, “The Vampyre”
Peter D. Grudin, “The Vampire”
James B. Twitchell, Introduction to The Living Dead
(Final Paper Due)
IV. Teaching Materials:
Besides 9 primary literary texts, 28 critical essays or book chapters are
assigned for oral reports and class discussions. Although I have every
piece of writing ready, I have not got the time and hand to have all of them
printed out and compiled into one collection volume. If you like to have
such a volume produced for each of you, it may not be ready yet for the
first session. Another, bigger, concern is that I am not sure whether I have
included too many materials. One reason why I include so many pieces is
that there are 15 students, each of whom should be assigned a reasonable
workload of two oral reports. Anyway, most of the pieces are around 20
pages long and should not involve too much labor—if you already have
the primary texts covered during the summer break.
V. Class Activities:
1. Each week one or two students are required to do oral reports on introductory or
critical essays about themes or stories of the literary Gothic. The oral report will
be followed by a general discussion among participants, including me.
2. I will have a course website set up on the school Internet Teaching
platform, Iteach (http://iteach.ncku.edu.tw/ ). Oral report outlines and
PowerPoint files prepared by both you and me will be posted on the
website. A forum is also set up on the website, and each student is
encouraged to join general discussion. You are welcomed to come up there
to start or join discussion threads related to course work; I will hang
around, too, reading your discussion or even join it.
VI. Requirements:
1. Each student is required to do two oral reports on critical essays or book chapters.
The reporter should prepare a copy of the report outline for each participant or
PowerPoint file for me to put on the course website. Since we don’t have much
time for each session, limit the oral report time within 25 minutes. Don’t fall into
trivial details when preparing the outline or the PowerPoint file; important details
will come up during the following discussion.
2. Each student is required to write two response papers (5 pages for Ph.D. and 3 for
M.A. students) on a story or theme of the literary Gothic, chosen by him/herself.
This paper does not need to be documented (i.e. with such scholarly appendages
as quotations, notes, bibliography, etc.), but it should focus on and develop a
single issue or idea. DON’T just write down your general impressions about it.
Writing the response papers will help you generate ideas for your final term paper.
3. The final paper in due on January 21st. It should be around 15 pages long for Ph.D.
and 10 for M.A. students (“Works Cited” included), in the latest MLA style (i.e.
one-inch margin, 1.5-space between lines, Times New Roman No.12 font,
foot-note format, etc.) The paper will be corrected, graded, and returned to you
after the winter break. You can develop your response paper into this final paper,
but DON’T just copy long passages from them. Besides, all the appendages to an
academic paper are required.
4. Plagiarism is a highly offensive crime in the academic world, so be careful with
your quotations and documentations. Flagrant violations of related regulations will
certainly leave me no choice but to fail you in this course.
5. As you are all graduate students, it becomes impolite to you to demand your class
attendance. However, if you are found absent quite often, you still may not be able
to get the kind of grade you expect—even though you do your oral reports and
turn in your due papers as required.
VII. Evaluation System:
Oral report 30%, Class discussion 10%: short response paper 20%; long term
paper 40%
VIII.
Bibliography:
This bibliography lists only items that are to be used as teaching materials. As I said, I
have all of them and am ready to share them with you.
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. London: Penguin, 1985. [Available in our
library]
Baines, Paul. “‘This Monstrous Theatre of Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the
Drama of Incest” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 287-309.
[A Copy of My Own]
Bentman, Raymond. “Horace Walpole’s Forbidden Passion” in Queer
Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures. Ed. Martin Duberman.
New York: NYUP (1997). 276-89.
Botting, Fred. The Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996. [Available in our library]
Brooks, Peter. “Virtue and Terror: The Monk.” ELH 40 (1973): 249-63. [A Copy
of My Own]
Chiu, Frances A. “‘Dark and dangerous designs’: Tales of Oppression,
Dispossession, and Repossession, 1770-1800.” Romanticism on the Net 28
(November 2002) http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/
Dole, Carol M. “Three Tyrants in The Castle of Otranto.” English
Language Notes 26:1(September 1988):26-35.
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of
Domestic Ideology. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986. [Available in our library]
Fitzgerald, Lauren. “The Sexuality of Authorship of The Monk.” Romanticism on
the Net 36-37 (November 2004-February 2005)
http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/
Frank, Marcie. “Horace Walpole’s Family Romance.” Modern Philology 100:3
(2003): 417-35. [A Copy of My Own]
Gautier, Gary. “Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian in Context: Gothic Villains,
Romantic Heroes, and a New Age of Power Relations” Genre 32 (Fall
1999): 201-24. [A Copy of My Own]
Grudin, Peter. “The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit.” Journal of
Narrative Technique 5 (1975): 136-46.
. . . “The Vampire: Its Introduction into England and its Establishment as a
Theme in English Fiction of the Early Nineteenth Century” in The Demon
Lover: The Theme of Demoniality in English and Continental Fiction of the
Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century. Harvard UP, 1987; 52-94 [A
Copy of My Own]
Heller, Lee E. “Frankenstein and the Cultural Uses of Gothic” in Frankenstein.
Ed. Johanna M. Smith. 325-41.
Hume, Robert D. “Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel.”
PMLA 84 (1969): 282-90. [A Copy of My Own]
Isaac, Megan Lynn. “Sophia Lee and the Gothic of Female Community.” Studies
in the Novel 28:2 (Summer 1996): 200-18.
Jones, Wendy. “Stories of Desire in The Monk.” ELH 57 (1990): 129-50. [A
Copy of My Own]
Lee, Sophia. The Recess: or, A Tale of Other Times. Ed. April Alliston.
Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000.
Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth “‘Ev’ry Lost Relation’: Historical Fictions and
Sentimental Incidents in Sophia Lee’s The Recess.”
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7:2 (January 1995): 165-84.
Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. [An older, 1981, Oxford
edition available in our library]
MacDonald, D. L. “The Erotic Sublime: The Marvelous in The Monk.” English
Studies in Canada 18:3 (1992): 273-85.
Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic” in Literary Women. 1963. New York: Oxford UP,
1985; 90-110. (Also included the Norton edition of Frankenstein, 214-24)
Mulman, Lisa Naomi. “Sexuality on the Surface: Catholicism and the Erotic
Object in Lewis’s The Monk.” The Bucknell Review 42: 1 (1998): 98-110.
[A Copy of My Own]
Polidori, John. “The Vamypre” in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre.
Eds. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
[available in our library]
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765
to the Present Day. New York: Longman, 1980. [Available in our library]
Radcliff, Ann. The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1968. [Available in our library]
Reeve, Clara. The Champion of Virtue (or The Old English Baron). Varieties of
female Gothic. Volume 1. Ed. Gray Kelly. London: Pickering & Chatto,
2002; pp. 5-100; pp.239-42. [Available in our library]
Roberts, Bette B. “The Horrid Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho and
Northanger Abbey” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. Ed.
Kenneth W. Graham. New York: AMS Press, 1989. [A Copy of My Own]
Saglia, Diego. “Looking At The Other: Cultural Difference and the
Traveller’s Gaze in The Italian.” Studies in the Novel 28:1 (1996):
12-37.
Schmitt, Cannon. “Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann
Radcliffe’s The Italian.” ELH 61 (1994): 853-76.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996.
[Available in our library]
---. Frankenstein. Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s
Press, 1992.
Smith, Andrew and Diana Wallace. “The Female Gothic: Then and Now.” Gothic
Studies 6:1(May 2004): 1-7
Tooley, Brenda. “Gothic Utopia: Heretical Sanctuary in Ann Radcliffe’s The
Italian.” Utopian Studies 11:2 (2000): 42-56. [A Copy of My Own]
Twitchell, James B. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic
Literature. Duke UP, 1981; 3-38.
Waldron, Mary. “Early Experiments and ‘Northanger Abbey’” in Jane Austen
and the Fiction of Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999; 16-36.
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1982. [Available in our library]
. . . The Mysterious Mother. The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother.
Ed. Frederick S. Frank. New York: Broadview, 2003. [A Copy of My Own]
IX. Extra Bibliography:
The following items are presented to you because they are frequently referred
to in criticisms on Gothic fictions; they thus become crucial texts in the related
study. You may like to consult them for your further studies.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVLL. London: Hogarth, 1995;
pp.219~52. [Available in our library]
Sage, Victor. Ed. The Gothick Novel: A Casebook. London: McMillan, 1990.
[Available in our library]
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Abridged
Edition). New York: Penguin, 1979.
Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London:
Fortune, 193?.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cornell
UP, 1975.
Tompkins, J.M.S. The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 1961.