Brief description
This module aims to provide students with an understanding of a significant literary genre within a broad historical context. A popular form within fiction and poetry of the 1790s, the Gothic was associated with excess, rebellion, sexual licence and lawlessness. Elements of the genre persisted throughout the 19th century, undergoing various metamorphoses. Theatrical and fantastic elements of the Gothic were exploited by women writers to express the transgressive and the monstrous. The psychological dimension of the Gothic, its telling moral ambivalence, its preoccupation with paranoia and fear and its exploration of the uncanny remained a rich seam even within realist forms of writing.