In 1764 Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, inaugurating a spectacular era in the writing of ‘terror’ through a new and sensational form of ‘Romance’: the ‘Gothic’ novel. But Walpole’s revolutionary fiction also looks back to a Renaissance literary heritage, especially that of Shakespearean drama. ‘Shakespeare’, Walpole wrote, ‘was the model I copied’, as did so many others.
Exploring early modern concepts and forms of the Gothic this module will focus on the most seminal and influential texts and authors to shape the early modern Gothic imagination, from Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton to Matthew ‘The Monk’ Lewis and the acknowledged ‘Shakespeare’ of eighteenth-century Gothic novelists, Ann Radcliffe.
Students will discover how Renaissance writers laid the foundations for eighteenth-century Gothic fiction and drama in their shocking explorations of desire and corruption, tyranny and tragedy, human frailty and psychological terror. But it also considers how the earliest ‘Gothic’ novels and plays rewrite Renaissance texts and tropes, reshaping tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth for fresh literary interpretation and imaginative appropriation in light of ongoing cultural anxieties about changing social, religious, and political landscapes and literary sensibilities: to do with imagination and feeling, reason and religion, psychological horror and transgressive desire.
This module will be assessed first by a short formative exercise (1000-1200 words) and then through a summative essay (3500-3800 words).