VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Empire and the Globalising Gothic around 1800
Caroline Kögler
Kommentar
This course examines the Gothic as a literary mode emerging in tandem with the rapid expansion of European imperial power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Far from being confined to the haunted castles of a fictionalised Europe, the Gothic became a globalising form, absorbing and refracting anxieties about colonial encounters, the Atlantic slave trade, revolution, and shifting ideas of race, gender, and national identity. We will explore how Gothic fiction negotiated the “otherness” of distant geographies, the fear and fascination of the exotic, and the violent realities of imperialism—often transforming imperial peripheries into the haunted landscapes of the imagination.
Our intersectional readings will pair canonical Gothic works with novels and narratives shaped by the circulation of people, goods, and ideas across, primarily, the Atlantic and Mediterranean. We will investigate how this globalising Gothic contributed to, and at times critiqued, the cultural logics of empire, drawing on postcolonial theory, transnational literary history, and critical race studies.
Primary texts include:
- Anne Radcliffe, The Sicilian Romance (1790)
- Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
- Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)
- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
16 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung