Introductory description

Engaging with a range of "Tales of Terror" from the Anglophone world/ in English translation c.1770 – 1920, this module will introduce you to the relationship between "the Gothic" (in its various meanings) and "the short form" - from the oral and transcribed folktale; the literary ballad; to the narrative poem, through to illustrated sensation tales and to the high-literary Gothic tale and the non-fiction tales and contexts with which they intersected. You will encounter tales of the supernatural, of psychological uncertainty, that are uncanny, and which sometimes include visceral horror. As well as strengthening your close-reading skills, this module will enable you to critically evaluate a developing form in its material, historical, visual, and transnational context; enhancing your understanding of the literary networks in which Gothic tales participated, were transcribed, circulated, appropriated, received, reviewed, and theorised. Material and print cultures and the modes and effects of changing publication contexts will be a key component throughout. Thinking also about the aesthetics of these works, you will consider why and how the Gothic (whatever that may mean) was a particularly influential mode in the rise of the Short Story.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: Introduction to "Gothic" and "The Short Form"

In this introductory week we will use short set secondary reading on “the short form” and on “the Gothic” to tease out the stylistic aspects that characterise the works and the wider theoretical issues we will encounter and consider on the module.

Week 2: Tales of Terror: Reception and Craft [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 3: Terror in the Streets: Chapbooks and Bluebooks
Week 4: From the Streets to the Parlour: “Gothic” Ballads [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 5: Early Fragments and Short Stories

Week 6: READING WEEK -

Week 7: Folklore and the Gothic [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 8: Periodical Publishing in Print – A Library Workshop [ 2 hours]
Week 9: Periodical Publishing and the Digital [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 10: “Ghost Stories” for Christmas

TERM 2

Term 2 continued will get you to think about how the Gothic was used to affirm and unsettle changing ideologies of the self (spiritual, physical, as individual, as citizen, as human, as sexualised, gendered, racialised) and the way the Self interacted with and was measured by external and internal spaces, by ideas of us/them, the national and the foreign. So too, the limits of knowledge touched upon in term 1 are further explored.

The final weeks will build on some of the earlier work we did on publishing and will place many of the tales we have already studied, as well as some new works, in their material, cultural, and particularly publishing contexts, thinking about how those stories change in regards to the Gothic effect, when illustrated, reformed, republished, adapted, moved from the nineteenth-century to the present.

Week 1: The Science of/and the Supernatural [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 2: Spirituality, Religion, and the Short Gothic
Week 3: Queering the Short Gothic
Week 4: Topographies of Terror [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 5: Colonial and Imperial Terrors

Week 6: READING WEEK

Week 7: Visualising the Gothic Short Form [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 8: Terror in Translation
Week 9: Anthologies and Collections [THIS IS A LECTURE WEEK]
Week 10: Studies in Genre

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the socio-religious and/or oral/literary traditions from which many tales derived or were influenced by.
• Describe and explain the formal and stylistic characteristics of selected tales and their adaptations and appropriations produced in the long nineteenth century through which literary experiments were enacted and theories of the short literary form were shaped.
• Demonstrate knowledge of the publication contexts and material forms in which tales were transcribed, circulated, and experienced over the course of the long nineteenth century and how the rise of the anthology reshapes the tales in our own time.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the Gothic as a fashionable and controversial mode through which social and cultural anxieties were expressed.
• Analyse the Gothic tale’s relationship to notions of nation, gender, and class in terms of authorship and readership.
• Formulate original arguments to do with an aspect of the module based on independent research.

Indicative reading list

Indicative Reading List
Scott’s An Apology for Tales of Terror (1799); selections from Matthew Lewis Tales of Terror and Wonder.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Philosophy of Composition" Graham's Magazine, 1846

March-Russell, Paul, “Origins: From Folk-Tale to Art Tale” in The Short Story: An Introduction (2009), pp.1-12.

Baker, Jen. "Introduction: Gothic and the Short Form." Gothic Studies 23.2 (2021): 127-131.
Baycroft, Timothy, and David Hopkin. Folklore and nationalism in Europe during the long nineteenth century. Brill, 2012.
Belsey, Catherine. "Shakespeare's Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories." Shakespeare Quarterly 61.1 (2010): 1-27.
Brake, Laurel. "Star Turn? Magazine, Part-Issue, and Book Serialisation." Print in Transition, 1850–1910. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2001. 27-51.
Boratti, Vijayakumar M. "Folklore and the Civilizing Gaze of Modernity: An Indian Folklorist in Colonial Karnataka." Folklore 130.3 (2019): 300-310.
Boud, Holly Young. Blackwood's to Hawthorne in Light of Its Mid-nineteenth Century Transatlantic Reputation. Brigham Young University, 2018.
Bourke, Angela. "Reading a woman's death: colonial text and oral tradition in nineteenth-century Ireland." Feminist Studies 21.3 (1995): 553-586.
Blackburn, Stuart H. Print, folklore, and nationalism in colonial South India. Orient Blackswan, 2006.
Blair, David, ed. Gothic short stories. Wordsworth Editions, 2002.
Brown, Clarence E. "The Gothic Short Story in American Periodicals from 1800-1850 with Especial Reference to the Lady Books." (1949).
Dalmia, Vasudha. "Vernacular histories in late nineteenth-century Banaras: Folklore, Purānas and the new antiquarianism." The Indian Economic & Social History Review 38.1 (2001): 59-79.
Darnell, Regna. "American anthropology and the development of Folklore scholarship: 1890-1920." Journal of the Folklore Institute 10.1/2 (1973): 23-39.
Dorson, Richard M. "The shaping of folklore traditions in the United States." Folklore 78.3 (1967): 161-183.
Edmundson, Melissa. "The ‘Uncomfortable Houses’ of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant." Gothic studies 12.1 (2010): 51-67.
Edmundson, Melissa. Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire. Springer, 2018.
Garrett, Peter K. Gothic reflections: Narrative force in nineteenth-century fiction. Cornell University Press, 2003.
Golightly, Karen B. Who put the folk in folklore?: Nineteenth-century collecting of Irish folklore from T. Crofton Croker to Lady Augusta Gregory. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2007.
Grove, Allen W. "To make a long story short: Gothic fragments and the gender politics of incompleteness." Studies in Short Fiction 34.1 (1997): 1-11;
Handley, Sasha. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost beliefs and ghost stories in eighteenth century England. Routledge, 2015.
Hart, Carina. "Gothic Folklore and Fairy Tale: Negative Nostalgia." Gothic Studies 22.1 (2020): 1-13.
Harris, Jason Marc. Folklore and the fantastic in nineteenth-century British fiction. Routledge, 2016.
Harris, Katherine D. The Forgotten Gothic: Short Stories from the British Literary Annuals, 1823-1831. Zittaw Press, 2012.
Hutton, Ronald. "The English reformation and the evidence of folklore." Past & Present 148 (1995): 89-116.
Jackson, Bruce. The Negro and his folklore in nineteenth-century periodicals. No. 18. University of Texas Press, 1967.
James, Montague Rhodes. "Twelve Medieval Ghost-Stories." The English Historical Review 37.147 (1922): 413-422.
Joynes, Andrew, ed. Medieval ghost stories: An anthology of miracles, marvels and prodigies. Boydell & Brewer, 2006.
Kędra-Kardela, Anna. "Between a Fragment and a Whole. A Cognitive Analysis of the Gothic Fragment as a Literary Genre. A Case Study of Anna Letitia Aikin’s ‘Sir Bertrand: A Fragment.’." Crossroads in Literature and Culture. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. 341-350.
Killick, Tim. British short fiction in the early nineteenth century: the rise of the tale. Routledge, 2016.
Mayo, Robert D. "The Gothic short story in the magazines." The Modern Language Review (1942): 448-454.
McDowell, Stacey. "Folklore." The encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012).
Mills, Kirstin A. "Haunted by ‘Lenore’: The Fragment as Gothic Form, Creative Practice and Textual Evolution." Gothic Studies 23.2 (2021): 132-147.
Naithani, Sadhana. "An axis jump: British colonialism in the oral folk narratives of Nineteenth-Century India." Folklore 112.2 (2001): 183-188.
Naithani, Sadhana. "The colonizer-folklorist." Journal of folklore research (1997): 1-14.
Naithani, Sadhana, Luisa Del Giudice, and Gerald Porter. "Prefaced Space: Tales of the Colonial British Collectors of Indian Folklore." Imagined States: Nationalism, Utopia, and Longing in Oral Cultures (2001): 64-79.
Newton, Michael. "Haunted Hotels and Murder Inns: Travelers’ Tales from Europe and the Gothic Short Story from the 1820s to the 1940s." Haunted Europe. Routledge, 2019. 88-106.
Noonan, Mark. "Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation by Thomas Vranken." American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 31.2 (2021): 160-163.
Pitcher, Edward W. "Eighteenth-century Gothic fragments and the paradigm of violation and repair." Studies in Short Fiction 33.1 (1996): 35.
Reyes, Xavier Aldana. "From the 1860s to the Fin-de-Siècle: The Development of the Gothic Short Story." Spanish Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017. 109-132.
Ruppert, Timothy. "Romantic Vision and Gothic Balladry: Anne Bannerman's Tales of Superstition and Chivalry." Literature Compass 10.10 (2013): 783-796.
Savonius-Wroth, Celestina. "" In the Village Circle": Washington Irving and Transatlantic Folk Revivals." Western Folklore 79 (2020).
Senf, Carol A. The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature. University of Wisconsin Pres, 2013.
Scott, Sir Walter ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad.’ Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1902), pp. 1-58
Spector, Robert D. "The Gothic." Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism. Routledge, 2002. 1064-1074.
Thomas, Sophie. "The Return of the Fragment:" Christabel" and the Uncanny." Bucknell Review 45.2 (2002): 51.
Vuohelainen, Minna. "Traveller's Tales: Rudyard Kipling's Gothic Short Fiction." Gothic Studies 23.2 (2021): 181-200.
Wallace, Diana. "Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic." Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 57-68.
Wynne, Deborah. "Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic Fragment:‘The Story of Willie Ellin’." Victoriographies 11.1 (2021): 20-37.

Research element

Some seminars will involve students feeding back on research pf primary sources.

The assessments will require students to undertake independent research to reflect on the processes, resource difficulties, and joys of the research. They will respond to a set of options or may formulate an original research question based on any aspect of the material they have studied, but must draw on primary texts, archival materials, and secondary literature to demonstrate their understanding of the key concepts and contexts covered by the module. There will also be small research tasks throughout the module to discuss in class.

Interdisciplinary

Historical analysis

Subject specific skills

Close reading; analysis of genre, form, and style; capacity to understand, judge, compare, and employ different critical approaches.
Negotiation of publication contexts and researching primary sources.

Transferable skills

Comparative and close analysis, research, and the formulation of original and informed arguments.