We will read and discuss two classic Gothic novels of the 19^th century and begin by considering them in their specific social and cultural context with a view to the tradition of the genre before we try different theoretical approaches to exercise and practise different readings of the same novels. We will try to make meaning through conventional psychoanalytic literary criticism as much as through more deconstructive methods. Psychoanalysis and the Gothic novel have a long history, so we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as a novel that has a sexual subtext hidden from the Victorian reader and consider its covert and overt feminism. We will then turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from 1886 for its repressed meaning and turn this into a deconstructive queer reading of the same text. The critical concept of the ‘unspeakable’ as a Gothic trope and the Victorianist concept of ‘homosexual panic’ will be brought together while we pay particular attention to the historical context of 19^th-century England.

Please make sure that you have read both novels before the beginning of term.

Kurs im HIS-LSF