Can popular fiction be politically radical? How do texts that critics have described as “trash” or as sensational fiction make interventions in social debates and ideas? In this course, we will look at these questions through British and Russian Gothic fiction from the late eighteenth century through to contemporary tales.
This course focuses on how the aesthetics of Gothic fiction were used across time periods and cultures to create conversations on social and political issues. We will discuss what we mean by the Gothic now in modern British and Russian short stories, before tracing back to the roots of the genre in the late eighteenth century. Prices, printing, and illustrations of texts contributed to class and gender receptions of popular eighteenth-century texts. To explore how the material text is important to understanding the cultural significance of the Gothic tale, this course develops skills in analysing the physical text. We will analyse the formats of popular eighteenth-century texts, such as the differences between the novel and chapbook - or cheap print - eighteenth-century gothic tales.
We begin chronologically with popular fiction written by best-selling women authors of the late eighteenth century. These authors were writing at a time of a backlash against radicalism - including feminism - in British politics following the French Revolution. How did their popular fictions contribute to this shifting political climate? Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels would emerge to be some of the bestselling of the 1790s, and we will consider how her novel The Romance of the Forest (1791) enters these political debates. Charlotte Dacre’s sensational novel Zofloya (1806) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823) respond to and adapt Gothic themes, and invite explorations of how such changes across novels constitute discussions and debates of changing ideas. Our study of the literary timeline moves to Russian fiction, prompting questions of how Gothic aesthetics were adopted and altered across the nineteenth century: this will include critically overlooked writing such as Nadezhda Durova / Aleksandr Aleksandrov’s ‘The Sulphur Spring’ (1839), as well as Nikolai Gogol’s short stories. We will consider whether recurring and popular forms of Gothic aesthetics were used to cement, or discredit, social norms.