Douglas R. Mason (1918-2013)

The English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing department at the University of Manchester is sad to learn of the death earlier this month of Douglas Mason, who studied English and Psychology at Manchester. He may well have been the last connection with the pre-war English department, having begun his studies here in 1937. A close friend at this time was fellow-student Anthony Burgess (John Burgess Wilson), who wrote about him in his autobiographical Little Wilson and Big God (1987). After service in the army through the war, Douglas returned to Manchester to complete his degree, graduating in 1948. He became a teacher and headmaster and, in retirement, a local councillor. Having suffered a heart attack in his early forties he decided to write – the result was over forty published novels in the genres of science fiction and historical writing; he also wrote many short stories. The Head of Division, Dr David Matthews, has sent his condolences to Douglas Mason's son, John.

Reading list for ENGL31072 Writing the Supernatural in the Age of Shakespeare

 

ENGL31072 / 61072: WRITING THE SUPERNATURAL IN THE AGE OF

SHAKESPEARE (2013-14)

A PRELIMINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Primary Texts

 

The set pamphlet texts will all be available in the free course handbook (electronically also on Blackboard). If you want to read some of them, though, before the course begins, most can only be accessed through EEBO (Early English Books Online) which can be accessed through the library databases. You will need to buy the play-texts (marked with an asterisk below).

 

Monsters

Anon., The true descripcion of a childe with ruffes borne in the parish of Micheham

                (1566)

Anon., The forme and shape of a monstrous child, born at Maidstone in Kent (1568)

Thomas Locke, A strange and lamentable accident that happened lately at Mears-Ashby (1642)

Anon., A declaration of a strange and wonderfull monster (1646)

Anon., The Ranters Monster (1652)

Anon., The strange monster (1668)

Anon., A true relation of a monstrous female-child (1680)

 

Ghosts

Anon., Sad and wonderful newes from the faulcon at the bank side (1661)

Anon., A strange and wonderfull discovery of a horrid and cruel murther committed

            fourteen yeares since upon the body of Robert Elliot (1662)

Anon., A true relation of the horrid ghost of a woman (1673)

Anon., Great news from Middle-Row in Holbourn (1680)

Anon., The mournfull widow (1690)

*William Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

Witches

Anon., The Examination and Confession of certain Wytches (1566)

Anon., A rehearsal both straung and true (1579)

Anon., The wonderful discovery of the witchcrafts of Margaret and Philip Flower

                (1619)

Henry Goodcole, The wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch (1621)

*William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton (written

                c.1621; published 1658)

*William Shakespeare, Macbeth

 

Demonic possession

Anon., Most fearfull and strange newes from the bishopricke of Durham (1641)

Anon., A return of prayer: or A faithful relation of some remarkable passages of

providence concerning Thomas Sawdie (1664)

Anon., The Hartford-shire Wonder: or, Strange News from Ware (1669)

Anon., Strange and wonderful news from Yowel in Surrey (1681)

Richard Kirby, Dreadful news from Wapping; being a further relation of the sad and

miserable condition of Sarah Bower (1693)

 

Magic and magicians

*Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus

*William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

Fairies

Moses Pitt, An account of one Ann Jefferies (1696)

*William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

 

 

Criticism and context 

 

Fuller bibliographies will be available week by week, but here is a guide to getting started. You will not want to read everything here! Pick what is most appropriate for your interests and your chosen essay topic. You will probably want to get the books from the library rather than buying them. Don't forget also to check out the fuller, week by week bibliographies.

 

History, culture, society

Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: the Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603 (2000)

David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and

            Stuart England (1980)

Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 (2000)

Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 (1996)

Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: a People's History (2006)

James A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: a Social History, 1550-1760 (1987)

Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (1982)

 

Gender

Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (1996)
Amanda Capern, The Historical Study of Women: England, 1500-1700 (2008)

Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500 -1800 (1995)

Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge, 2012)

Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (1998)

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: the Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England

                (1996)

Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (2005)

Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2003).

Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977)

 

Religion and the supernatural

Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell's England (2011)

Patrick Collinson, The Reformation (2003)

Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-century

Print Culture (2^nd ed,, 2005)

Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man's Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in

            Post-Reformation England (2007)

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972)

Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (2002)

Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural,1553-1829 (2013)

 

Cheap print

Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (2003)

Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in

            Early Modern England (1997)

Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (2003)

Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (1996)

 

Narrating the supernatural

Frances Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature and Evidence in Seventeenth-

            century England (2013)

Jerome Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution: the

                Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies (UCL Press, 1993)

Marion Gibson, 'Understanding Witchcraft? Accusers' Stories in Print in Early

            Modern England' (Stuart Clark ed., Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative,

            Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, 2001, pp. 41-54.)

Louise Jackson, 'Witches, Wives and Mothers: Witchcraft Persecution and Women's

            Confessions in Seventeenth-century England' (Women' History Review 4

            1995), pp. 63-84.

Jacqueline Pearson, '"Then she asked it, what were its Sisters names?": Reading

            between the lines in seventeenth-century pamphlets of the supernatural'

            (Seventeenth Century 28, 2013, pp. 63-78).

 

The supernatural : general

Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason and Religion 1200-1750

                (2010)

Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

            (1997)

David Cressy, Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and

                Stuart England (2001).

Lorraine Daston, 'Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe'

                (Critical Inquiry 18, 1991), pp. 93-124.

Ryan Curtis Friesen, Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture

            (2010)

Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (2006)

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart ed., The Occult in Early Modern Europe: a Documentary

            History (1999)

Darren Oldridge, Strange Histories: the trial of the pig, the walking dead, and other

            matters of fact from the mediaeval and Renaissance worlds (2005)

Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Early Modern England (2000).

Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of

            Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (2011)

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)

Frederick Valletta, Witchcraft, Magic and Superstition in England, 1640-70 (2000).

Alexandra Walsham, 'The Reformation and "the Disenchantment of the World"

            Reassessed' (The Historical Journal 51, 2008, pp. 497-528).

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5, trans. Talcott

            Parsons, 1930)

 

The supernatural on stage

Roberta Barker, '"An honest dog yet": Performing The Witch of Edmonton' (Early

Theatre 12, 2009), pp. 163-182.

Ryan Curtis Friesen, Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture

            (2010)

Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001)

Anthony Harris, Night's Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in 17^th-century English

            drama (1980)

Laura Kolb, 'Playing with Demons: interrogating the supernatural in Jacobean drama'

            (Forum for Modern Language Studies 43, 2007), pp. 337-50

Ian McAdam, Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama (2009)

Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of

Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (2011)

Verna Theile and Andrew D. McCarthy eds., Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern

Europe (2013)

Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Devil Theatre: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in

            English Renaissance Drama, 1558-1642 (2007)

Stanley Wells, 'Staging Shakespeare's Ghosts' (Murray Biggs et al. eds., The Arts of

            Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G. K.

            Hunter, 1991), pp. 50-69.  

 

Portents, prodigies and providence

William E. Burns, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England

                1657-1727 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002)

William E. Burns, 'Signs of the Times: Thomas Jackson and the Controversy over

                Prodigies in the Reign of Charles I' (Seventeenth Century 11, 1996, pp. 21-33)

Christopher Durston, 'Signs and Wonders and the English Civil War' (History Today

                37,1987, pp. 22-8)

Jerome Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution: the

                Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies (UCL Press, 1993)

Anne Dunan Page, 'Le châtiment de Dorothy Mately: mise en livre des histories de

                jugement à la Restauration' (Bulletin de la Société d'études anglo-américaines

                des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 50, 2000), pp. 31-49.

Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press,

                Oxford, 1999).

Blair Worden, 'Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England' (Past and Present

                109, 1985), pp. 55-99.

 

Monstrous births

Alan W. Bates, Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births

                in Early Modern Europe (Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2005).

Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing 'monsters' in Shakespearean drama and early

            modern culture (2002),  esp. chapter 1.

Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: monstrous births in post-Reformation

            England (2005)

David Cressy, Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and transgressions in Tudor and

Stuart England (2001; originally, as Travesties and transgressions in Tudor

and Stuart England, 2000),

David Cressy, 'Lamentable, strange and wonderful: headless monsters in the English

            revolution' (Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes eds., Monstrous

            Bodies / Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, 2004), pp. 40-63.

 

Ghosts

Jo Bath and John Newton, '"Sensible proof of spirits": ghost belief during the later

            seventeenth century' (Folklore 117, 2006), pp. 1-14.

Todd Butler, 'The Haunting of Isabell Binnington: Ghosts of Murder, Texts and Law

            in Restoration England' (Journal of British Studies 50, 2011, pp. 248-76)

Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001)

Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in

            Eighteenth-century England (2007)

Peter Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop: a Ghost Story (2007)

John Newton and Jo Bath eds., Early Modern Ghosts (2002)

 

Witches

Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

(1997)

Stuart Clark ed., Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early

            Modern Culture (2001)

Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft (1999)

Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970)

Darren Oldridge eds., The Witchcraft Reader (second ed., 2008)

Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and 20^th-century Representations

                (1996)

Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early

            modern Europe (1994)

James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550-1750 (1996)

Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions

                in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005)

Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and maternal power in early

modern England (1995)

 

The devil and demonic possession

Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England:

            Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts (2004)

Andrew Cambers, 'Demonic Possession, Literacy and 'Superstition' in Early Modern

            England' (Past and Present 202, 2009), pp. 3-35.

Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (2006)

Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (Yale UP,

            New Haven, 2013)

Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Early Modern England (2000).

Kathleen R. Sands, Demon Possession in Elizabethan England (2004)

James Sharpe, 'Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority, and

            Possessed Young People' (Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle eds.,

            The experience of authority in early modern England, 1996)

 

Magic

Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (2005)

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Wizards: a History (2004)

Ian McAdam, Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama (2009)

John S. Mebane, Renaissance magic and the return of the golden age: the occult

                tradition and Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare (1989)

Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of

            Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (2011)

Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: a Study in Intellectual

                Patterns (1972)

 

Fairies

K. M. Briggs, The Fairies in tradition and literature (1967)

K. M. Briggs, The anatomy of Puck: an examination of fairy beliefs among

Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors (1959)

Roger Lancelyn Green, 'Shakespeare and the Fairies' (Folklore 73, 1962), pp. 89-103.

Mary Ellen Lamb, 'Taken by the fairies: fairy practices and the production of popular

                culture in A Midsummer Night's Dream' (Shakespeare Quarterly 51, 2000),

                pp.277-312.

Diane Purkiss, Troublesome things: a history of fairies and fairy stories (2001)

Wendy Wall, 'Why does Puck sweep? Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle'

                (Shakespeare Quarterly 52, 2001), pp. 67-106.

 

Reading list for ENGL30071 Gothic: Politics, Sexuality and Identity in British Gothic Writing

Last updated 26^th May 2013

 

 

 

Department of English and American Studies

University of Manchester

1^st Semester 2013-2014

3^rd Year Option: ENGL 30072

GOTHIC

Politics, Sexuality and Identity in British Gothic Writing

1789-1900

Professor Patricia Duncker

 

            This course aims to provide students with an understanding of a significant and influential literary genre within a broad historical context.  The Gothic was an exceedingly popular form within the fiction and poetry in Britain and on the continent during the 1790s and was associated with excess, revolutionary rebellion, sexual license and lawlessness.  Throughout the nineteenth century, elements of the genre persisted, undergoing various metamorphoses. The theatrical and fantastic elements of the Gothic were intriguingly exploited by women writers and often used to express transgressive desire and the monstrous. The psychological dimension of the Gothic, with 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. Freud drew on E. T.A Hoffmann's Gothic tale, The Sandman to develop his theory of the uncanny, (See his essay The Uncanny 1919) and the genre continues to fascinate modern audiences in films as well as popular and literary fiction.

 

AIMS

• To increase students' knowledge and awareness of the Gothic within a literary historical context

·         To broaden and deepen students' critical and theoretical skills in reading and understanding complex texts

·         To strengthen students' analytical ability to construct a literary argument using textual evidence

·         To improve both the oral presentation skills and the quality of students' written prose

 

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Students will acquire a deeper knowledge of the history of the Gothic as a literary form and register within nineteenth century British literature and a theoretical awareness of the literary practice involved in writing within this form.
• Students will improve their ability to mount a cogent argument using evidence and to present a persuasive case with rhetorical force.

 

ASSESSMENT

The Essay and Exam both carry 50% of the marks

20 credits: one general essay (3,000 words - 50%), where you can write about any of the texts on the course and a two-hour unseen exam (50%) with two questions, one on Romantic Gothic and the other on Victorian Gothic. You will be expected to comment in detail on at least two texts in your general essay and in both of your exam answers (50%). You must not duplicate material.

NB I will expect you to comment on and discuss the texts we have studied during the semester, both in your essay and in the exam. It is of course relevant to mention other Gothic texts, which you may have read, but we have not studied on the course, but they should not be the main focus of your discussion.

 

 

 

COURSE OUTLINE Academic Year 2013-2014

Autumn First Semester

 

 

ROMANTIC GOTHIC

 

 

Week 1 Introduction to the course and to Romantic Gothic Writing: Freud's Essay 'The Uncanny' (1919) and discussion of the source text: E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman. In what ways do the themes and technical devices employed by Hoffmann set the agenda for The Gothic as a whole and Freud in particular?

 

Week 2  M.G. Lewis The Monk (1796) Why was The Monk considered to be so shocking? In what ways is the book typical of 1790s Gothic Romances?  Consider the complex publication history of the novel and the charges of blasphemy that were brought against Lewis. What functions do the poems included in the novel serve? What is the significance of the German influence upon Lewis?

 

Week 3 Ann Radcliffe The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitants (1797) Radcliffe was the best-selling iconic writer of the 1790s, famous for her rational supernatural methods and her exquisite sensibility. How does she link landscape, setting, weather and psychic states? Don't forget to read her essay 'On the Supernatural in Poetry' New Monthly Magazine Vol. 16, No. 1 (1826), pp.145-152. This contains her famous distinction between 'terror' and 'horror'.

 

Week 4  S.T. Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797), Kubla Khan (1797)  and Christabel (1801) A good critical paperback edition is Ed. John Beer Poems (Everyman, 1993) Coleridge's Gothic poems are often considered as a group. In what ways do the poems resemble- and differ from - the popular Gothic ballads of the period, especially the famous German ballad, Bürger's 'Lenore'?  (Xeroxes provided)

 

Week 5 James Hogg The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

This uncanny tale of haunting, doubles and damnation marks a shift in the potential of British Gothic writing. Hogg uses the form to explore interior psychological states and continues the political arguments common in Gothic writing but on his home territory of Scotland. 

 

 

READING WEEK

falls in Week 6 of term

 

VICTORIAN GOTHIC

 

Week 7  The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and the Macabre by Victorian Women Writers Edited by Mike Ashley (Peter Owen, 2009) Can we gender the Gothic? What are the common themes and preoccupations in this collection?  How did women writers exploit the potential of ghosts and the conventions of ghostly tales?

 

Week 8 Charlotte Brontë Villette (1853) Kate Millett (in Sexual Politics 1^st edition, 1969,1970) described this novel as 'one long meditation on a prison break' (Virago Press, 1977,p.146). What do you think? How does Brontë exploit and subvert the conventional tropes of the Gothic? In what ways does her novel rewrite the structures made famous by Radcliffe?

 

Week 9 Christina Rossetti Goblin Market (1860) This major poem, startlingly erotic and very queer indeed, is included in all collections of her poems. We will also consider Rossetti's poems about sisters and several of her more theologically conventional religious poems.

 

Week  10  Robert Louis Stevenson  Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) In what ways is this tale a sinister example of Queer Gothic? How does the structure of the narrative transform our understanding of the meanings of the tale?

 

Week 11 Henry James The Turn of the Screw (1898) How does James represent the supernatural? Many readings of the novel turn on the character of the governess. Is she an insane hysteric or are the ghosts really there? Look at the framing narrative. How does the opening setting of country house ghost stories influence our reading of the tale?

 

Week 12 Bram Stoker Dracula (1897) Oxford World's Classics edition Ed Maud Ellmann (Oxford University Press, 1996) has a controversial and interesting Introduction. There is a more recent Oxford World's Classics edition, edited with notes by Roger Luckhurst, (Oxford University Press, 2011). See also the Penguin Classics Edition (Ed. Maurice Hindle, 1993). How are the tensions between ancient superstition and modernity dramatised in Dracula? What is the function of the opening chapters? Why does the fragmented narrative seem so modern in its concerns with writing, recording, documenting events?

 

SET TEXTS – SUGGESTED EDITIONS

We will concentrate on the following set texts, which are required reading for the course. These are available in many different cheap editions and we will study them in the order below. I have suggested critical editions for some of the texts, which contain useful notes and Introductions. On the whole, it's better to read from Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics editions. You'll find you need the notes.

 

• First session: Freud's 1919 essay 'The Uncanny'. Suggested edition The Uncanny Translated by David McLintock with an Introduction by Hugh Haughton (Penguin Books, 2003) This edition contains several other essays including 'Screen Memories' and 'The Creative Writer and Daydreaming'. E.T.A Hoffman 'The Sandman' This text is included in various anthologies. One suggested World's Classics edition is E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales Translated by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1992) This is a good translation of the texts.

 

• M.G. Lewis The Monk (1796) Use the Oxford World's Classics Edition as this has an excellent Introduction by Emma McEvoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

 

• Ann Radcliffe The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitants (1797) The World's Classics version is excellent with an Introduction and Notes by E.J. Clery ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

 

• S.T. Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797), Kubla Khan (1797) and Christabel (1801) A good critical paperback edition is Ed. John Beer Poems (Everyman, 1993) See also the Oxford World's Classics edition Ed. H.J. Jackson, 1985, and reissued 2008.

 

• James Hogg The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) Oxford World's Classics Edition edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) You really will need the notes to this complex text.

 

• Anthology: The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and the Macabre by Victorian Women Writers Edited by Mike Ashley (Peter Owen, 2009) This is the only edition which contains all the stories selected for study.

 

• Charlotte Brontë Villette (1853) I suggest the Penguin Classics edition with Introduction and Notes by Helen M. Cooper (London: Penguin Books, 2004) The novel contains a good deal of French; you may need the useful translations in the notes.

 

• Christina Rossetti Goblin Market (1860) Included in all collections of her poems. We will also look at some of the shorter poems. Various editions. Faber has published a selection.

 

• Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (1886) There are various good editions. Edited with Introduction and Notes by Robert Mighall (London : Penguin Books, 2002) This edition also contains Olalla, a famous vampire story.

 

• Henry James The Turn of the Screw (1898) (Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, Boston, New York, 1995) In the Casebook of Contemporary Criticism series. Contains a variety of critical approaches to the book with extensive bibliographies. There are other editions, notably the Oxford World's Classics edition which contains several other stories. 

 

• Bram Stoker   Dracula  (1897) Oxford World's Classics edition Ed. Roger Luckhurst, has a useful bibliography (Oxford University Press, 2011). But see the earlier Oxford World's Classics edition mentioned above with a suggestive introduction by Maud Ellmann.

 

 

SELECT  BIBLIOGRAPHY

The critical literature on the Gothic is vast and varied. Here are some useful starting points to the set texts and the subject. Start building your own bibliography as you go along. The Cambridge companions are available on-line. Don't forget to consult JSTOR, and SCHOLAR GOOGLE for your literature searches: our invaluable archive of articles available on-line.

 

BIOGRAPHIES, USEFUL ARTICLES AND CRITICAL STUDIES

 

Albrecht, Thomas, 'Sympathy and Telepathy: The Problem of Ethics in George Eliot's 'The Lifted Veil' ELH, Vol 73. No.2 ( Summer, 2006), pp. 437-463.

Bann, Jennifer, 'Ghostly Hand and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the Nineteenth Century Spectre' Victorian Studies 4, 51 (2009), pp. 663-686.

Battersby, Christine, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (Routledge, 2007) See especially her early chapters on Burke and Kant.

Beidler, Peter G., Henry James : The Turn of the Screw : Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, Boston, New York, 1995) Contains a variety of critical approaches to the book with extensive bibliographies.  

Blakemore, Stephen, 'Matthew Lewis's Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in The Monk' Studies in the Novel, 30 ( 1998), pp. 521-539.

Bloom, Clive, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror 1764 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2010) This is the most recent general history. Not always accurate, but very readable.

Botting, Fred, The Gothic (Routledge, 1996) Sensible, general. Very much a starting point.

Brown, Nicola and Burdett, Carolyn and Pamela Thurschwell Eds. The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Braben, Benjamin A., 'Surveying Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Landscapes' Literature Compass, 3 : 4 (2006), pp.840-845.

Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford University Press, 1981). Classic general history of literature in the Romantic Period.  See especially Chapter 7 on the novel in the Romantic period.

Carson, James P, Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) See especially Chapter 1: 'Gothic and Romantic Crowds'.

Castle, Terry, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Clery, E.J., 'The Supernatural Explained' The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 106-171.

Colman, Athena V., 'Lacan's Anamorphic Object: Beneath Freud's Unheimlich' Janus Head, Vol.12, Issue 2, Corpses, (2009), pp. 49-66.

Cox, Michael, and Gilbert, R.A., Eds. The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Dickerson, Vanessa D., Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Missouri: The University of Missouri Press, 1996)

Duncan, Ian, 'Authenticity Effects: The work of Fiction in Romantic Scotland' The South Atlantic Quarterly  Vol. 102, (Winter,2003), pp. 93-116.

Elliot, Kamilla, Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification 1764- 1835 (London: John Hopkins University Press, 2012)

Ellis, John M., 'Clara, Nathanael and the Narrator: Interpreting Hoffmann's Der Sandman' The German Quarterly, 54, ( 1981), pp. 1-18.

Evans, Meredith, 'Persons Fall Apart: James Hogg's Transcendent Sinner' NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction No. 36, (2003), pp. 198-218.

Fincher, Max, Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Franklin, Caroline, Ed. The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (Pearson Education Ltd: Harlow, 2011) Contains all the poetry texts you will need including Coleridge and some of the  Rossetti poems.

Germanà, Monica, 'The Sick Body and the Fractured Self: (Contemporary) Scottish Gothic' Gothic Studies Vol.13, Issue 2, (November, 2011), pp. 1-8.

Guest, Harriet, 'The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory after 1760' Eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale, Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts: 1780-1832 (Routledge, 1992), pp. 118-139.

Gordon, Lyndall, Charlotte Brontë : A Passionate Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994) Very useful on her relationship with Héger in Brussels and the contentious tale of her love letters to him.

Greenfield, Susan C., 'Veiled Desire: Mother–Daughter Love and Sexual Imagery in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian,'  The Eighteenth Century, 33.1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 73-89.

Haefele-Thomas, Ardel, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (Cardiff: The University of Wales Press, 2012)

Handley, Sasha, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth Century England  (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007)

Hanson, Clare, 'The Lifted Veil: Women and Short Fiction in the 1880s and 1890s' The Yearbook of English Studies, 26, (1996), pp. 135-142.

Heady, Emily W.,  ' "Must I render an Account?" Genre and Self-Narration in Charlotte Brontë's Villette' Journal of Narrative Theory 36 (2006), pp. 341-364.

Hughes, Gillian, James Hogg: A Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) The most recent biography.

Hughes, William, and Smith, Andrew, Queering the Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)

Imlay, Elizabeth, Charlotte Brontë and the Mysteries of Love: Myth and Allegory in Jane Eyre (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) Very strange, suggestive book on Jane Eyre.

Johnson, Claudia L.,  Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Jonte-Pace, Diane, Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion: Misogyny and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 'Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1985) Included in Wu, Romanticism: A Critical Reader, pp. 359-378. The links between Gothic and Queer studies is evident in the inheritance of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work.

Kreilkamp, Ivan, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Kilgour, Maggie, The Rise of the Gothic Novel ( London: Routledge, 1995)

Long Hoeveler, Diane, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998)

Lawrence, Karen, 'Disclosure and Reticence in Villette' Nineteenth Century Literature, 4. 1988), pp. 448-466.

Lynch, Eve M., 'Spectral Politics: The Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant' in The Victorian Supernatural Eds. Nicola Brown et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 67-86.

Mahawatte, Royce, George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender, Feeling (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013)

Martin, Carol, 'Gaskell's Ghosts: Truths in Disguise' Studies in the Novel 21, 1 (1989), pp. 27-40.

Massé, Michelle, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Cornell University Press, 1992) See especially Chapter 1 ' Things that Go Bump in the Night: Husbands, Horrors and Repetition'.

Meyers, Helen, Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience  (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001

Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Miller Lucasta, The Brontë Myth (Jonathan Cape, 2001) Excellent and well written.

Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (The Women's Press, 1978) See especially Chapter 5 'Female Gothic' and Chapter 7 ' Travelling Heroinism: Gothic for Heroines'. This is an old text, but still original in its scope and radical in its conclusions.

Pearson, Jacqueline, Women's Reading in Britain 1750-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) See especially Chapter 3 'The pleasures and perils of reading'.

Pittock, Murray, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Pioneering book on national identity and Gothic.

Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day 1^st edition (London: Longman, 1980)  (2^nd edition, 1996) A standard history.

________. A Companion to the Gothic (Blackwell Publishers, 2001)

Redecop, Magdalene, 'Beyond Closure: Buried Alive with Hogg's Justified Sinner' ELH, Vol 52, No.1, (1985), pp.159-184.

Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1997)

Rigby, Mair, 'Uncanny Recognition: Queer Theory's Debt to the Gothic' Gothic Studies, 11:1 (2009), pp.46-57.

Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2003)

Ruddick, Nicholas, 'The fantastic fiction of the fin de siècle' in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle Ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 189- 206.

Ryan, Robert M., The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789 - 1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Shelley, Mary, 'On Ghosts' London Magazine , 9, (1824), pp. 253-256.

Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle 1^st edition, Bloomsbury, 1991) (London :Virago, 1992)

Smith, Andrew, The Ghost Story 1840-1920 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010)

Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford Basil Blackwell, 1986) Very scholarly and full of information.

Spooner, Catherine and McEvoy, Emma Eds. The  Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007) This is one of the stronger collections of essays on Gothic and has a particularly useful section on 'Gothic Concepts'.

Swann, Karen 'Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel' ELH, 2 (1985), pp. 397-418.

Tooley, Brenda, 'Gothic Utopia: Heretical Sanctuary in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian' Utopian Studies, 11:2 (2000), pp. 42-56.

Wolfson, Susan J., Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2006) Especially interesting on gender, gendered discourses and writing in the Romantic period.

Wall, James, Contesting the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Wallace, Diana, 'Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story and Female Gothic' Gothic Studies (May, 2004) Vol. 6, Issue 1, pp. 57-67.

_____. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013)

Wood, Jane, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Wright, Angela Britain, France and the Gothic 1764-1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Ed. Wu, Duncan, Romanticism: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1995)          

 

 

 

CLASSIC GOTHIC PRIMARY TEXTS

If you decide that you would like to concentrate on a particular author or Gothic writing in either period then you might find it useful to read some of the texts listed below. These are optional texts, which will give you a broader understanding of the genres and forms within the Gothic.

If you didn't read Frankenstein while studying 'Contexts of Writing' in Year One then you will find this text essential reading.

 

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764) sometimes regarded as the first Gothic novel. It has all the standard tropes.

William Beckford  Vathek   (1786) Queer Orientalism from an eccentric writer.

Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) This is the novel that had Henry Tilney's hair standing on end( see Jane Austen Northanger Abbey). It's long, but a real pleasure to read.

Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) I shall assume a knowledge of Frankenstein. If you missed reading it then, add this pleasure to your essential reading list. Use the 1831 edition, which was extensively revised by Shelley herself and contains the famous Introduction which describes the dream sequence which, she claims, was the source of the novel. This is referred to in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and echoed in George Eliot's 'The Lifted Veil'. 

Charles Maturin Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale (1820) A long novel, based on the Faust pact, very gripping. An early example of Irish Gothic.

Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Both these classic texts are examples of regional domestic Gothic.

 

 

 

Patricia Duncker

Revised and updated 26^th May 2013