Introductory description

This module aims to help students examine the various ways in which popular and literary texts, media, and other cultural forms from the early c20th to the present engage with sub-genres of Gothic and Horror to negotiate, interrogate, and track what has and continues to Haunt “Britain” in its imperial and post-imperial condition, as a geographical locale, ideology, cultural space and more.

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.

Unit 1: Folk Horror

Peter Dickinson, The Weathermonger, 1968

Wr. Anthony Shaffer, dir. Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man, 1974

Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor, 1975

Lucy McKnight Hardy, Water Shall Refuse Them, 2019

Unit 2: Nuclear Gothic

H.G. Wells, The World Set Free, 1914

Leslie Mitchell, Gay Hunter, 1935

John Wyndham, The Chrysalids, 1955

Wr. Troy Kennedy Martin, dir. Martin Campbell, Edge of Darkness, 1985

Alex Lockwood, The Chernobyl Privileges, 2019

Unit 3: The Children are the Future

Andrew Hurley, The Loney (2014)

Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising (1984)

Jonathan Stroud, The Screaming Staircase (2013)

Jamilla Gavin Coram Boy (2000) or Helen Oyeyemi Icarus Girl (2006)

Ian McEwan The Child in Time (1987)

Unit 4: Historicising Horrors

A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (2009)

Daphne DuMaurier, Jamaica Inn (1936)

Hilary Mantel Beyond Black (2005) or Michelle Paver, Wakenhyrst (2019)

Alan Moore, From Hell [1989-1998]

Learning outcomes

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

• Acquire and demonstrate knowledge of key theoretical and literary concepts and cultural and critical contexts within which to situate the set texts
• Formulate nuanced analytical and advanced critical skills through close reading/viewing of the set texts
• Employ effectively a main method for reading texts within the nuanced context of various literary and cultural moments and generic categories
• Demonstrate and apply advanced independent research skills
• Demonstrate advanced ability to apply appropriate theoretical frameworks to analysis of the text
• Demonstrate an advanced understanding of the forging and interrogation of national identities through "haunting" motifs

Indicative reading list

Bibliography - units 1 and 2

Merlin Coverley, Folk Horror (2020)

Adam Scovell, Folk Horror (2017)

Bruce Franklin, War Stars (1988)

Jonathan Hogg, British Nuclear Culture (2016)

Ken Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism (1993)

Francis Ferguson, ‘The Nuclear Sublime’ (1984)

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (2014)

Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (1989)

Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear (2012)

Eli Carpenter, The Nuclear Cultures Sourcebook (2016)

E.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War (1966)

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (2013)

Drew Milne and John Kinsella, Angelaki number on nuclear criticism (2017)

Liam Sprod, Nuclear Futurism (2012)

Katy Shaw, Hauntology (2018)

Darby, Paul, and Niall Finneran. "Spectral Nation: Characterizing British Haunted Landscapes through the Lens of the 1970s ‘Ghost Gazetteer’and a Folk Horror Perspective." Folklore 133.3 (2022): 311-333.

Bibliography – Units 3 and 4

Buse, Peter, and Andrew Stott. Ghosts: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1999.

Darvay, Daniel. Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. Springer, 2016.

De Groot, Jerome. Remaking History: The past in contemporary historical fictions. Routledge, 2015.Kleinberg, Ethan. Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past. Stanford University Press, 2017.

Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Imagination and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth Century, ed. by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012)

Gildersleeve, Jessica. "The Spectre and the Stage: Reading and Ethics at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, the neo-Victorian, and the Gothic." Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18.3 (2013): 99-108.

Poore, Benjamin. "The Villain-effect: distance and ubiquity in neo-Victorian popular culture." Neo-Victorian Villains. Brill, 2017. 1-48.

Cox, Jessica, and Jessica Cox. "Neo-Gothic Sensations." Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction (2019): 41-72.

Arias, Rosario. "Haunted places, haunted spaces: The spectral return of Victorian London in Neo-Victorian fiction." Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (2009): 133-156.

Peeren, Esther, and Esther Peeren. "Ghosts of the Missing: Multidirectional Haunting and Self-Spectralization in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park." The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (2014): 144-179.

Jackson, Anna, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats, eds. The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders. Routledge, 2013.

Buckley, Chloé Germaine. Twenty-first-century Children's Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Research element

independent research and choices of texts for assessment.

Subject specific skills

Employ a few key methods / frameworks for reading texts within the context of contemporary Britain and what haunts it.
Demonstrate a broad and advanced knowledge of selected texts and concepts relating to the haunting of Britain.

Transferable skills

Acquire and apply knowledge of key theoretical and literary concepts and cultural and critical contexts within which to situate the set texts
Formulate advanced analytical and critical skills through close reading/viewing of the set texts
Adjust to scholarly standards and protocols of presentation
Indicate a strong understanding of critical, analytic, and creative approaches to produce knowledge
Exhibit an effective command of written English together with a wide-ranging and accurate vocabulary
Display textual analysis and critical argument
Conduct independent research through self-formulated questions