Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions
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Description
Recent decades have seen a revival of scholarly interest in Gothic fiction. Critics are attracted to the genre's exploration of irrationality, to its dark representation of the bourgeois family and of the psychological effects of social conflict. Because of this critical interest and because of the enduring popularity of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, the Gothic has become increasingly visible on college syllabi. This volume, like others in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, "Materials," gives information on available editions, anthologies, reference works, background sources, critical studies, films, and Web sites of value in teaching Gothic fiction. The second part, "Approaches," contains twenty-eight essays that define the genre; examine its connections to history, philosophy, feminism, social criticism; show its different forms in England, Ireland, the United States; and probe its themes--including such motifs as ghosts, castles, entrapped heroines, and animated corpses. Among the many authors discussed are Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison.
ISBN
9780873529075
Publication Date
2003
Publisher
Modern Language Association of America
City
New York
Disciplines
English Language and Literature
Comments
Table of Contents
Materials / Tamar Heller
Introduction / Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller
"And still insists he sees the ghosts”: defining the Gothic / Judith Wilt
Philosophy and the Gothic novel / Marshall Brown
The Gothic and ideology / Robert Miles
Teaching the Gothic through the visual arts / Stephen C. Behrendt
The horrors of misogyny: feminist psychoanalysis in the Gothic classroom / Anne Williams
Teaching the Gothic and the scientific context / Carol A. Senf
The first English Gothic novel: Walpole's 'The castle of Otranto' / James Norton
Early women's Gothic writing: historicity and canonicity in Clara Reeve's 'The old English baron' and Sophia Lee's 'The recess' / Angela Wright
Teaching the early female canon: Gothic feminism in Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Austen, Dacre, and Shelley / Diane Long Hoeveler
Suffering through the Gothic: teaching Radcliffe / Cannon Schmitt
Teaching the male Gothic: Lewis, Beckford, and Stevenson / Scott Simpkins
Teaching the homosocial in Godwin, Hogg, and Wilde / Ranita Chatterjee and Patrick M. Horan
Teaching the Gothic novel and dramatic adaptations / Marjean D. Purinton
Teaching Irish Gothic: big-house displacements in Maturin and Le Fanu / Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.
Fear of furniture: commodity Gothicism and the teaching of Victorian literature / Tricia Lootens
Hearts of darkness: teaching race, gender, and imperialism in Victorian Gothic literature / Tamar Heller
Surveying the vampire in nineteenth-century British literature / Daniel Scoggin
Teaching contemporary female Gothic: Murdoch, Carter, Atwood / Susan Allen Ford
Historicizing the American Gothic: Charles Brockden Brown's 'Wieland' / Teresa A. Goddu
Using narrative form to teach Poe's Gothic fiction / Richard Fusco
Teaching the doppelgänger in American Gothic fiction: Poe and James / A.A. Markley
The fall of the house of the seven gables and other ambiguities of the American Gothic / Laura Dabundo
Supernatural transmissions: turn-of-the-century ghosts in American women's fiction: Jewett, Freeman, Wharton, and Gilman / Kathy Justice Gentile
Teaching the African American Gothic: from its multiple sources to 'Linden Hills' and 'Beloved' / Jerrold E. Hogle
Making the case: teaching Stephen King and Anne Rice through the Gothic tradition / Bette B. Roberts
Teaching the Gothic in an interdisciplinary honors class / Sandy Feinstein
Involving resistant readers: exploring the Gothic through role-playing and identity writing / Mark James Morreale
Teaching Gothic literature through filmic adaptations / Wheeler Winston Dixon