Victorian Fiction: The Haunted Classics

Jerry Hogle
Spring 2014
SECTION FULL -- TUESDAYS |  
1:00 until 4:00 p.m.
January 21 until April 1, 2014 (no class on March 18 due to UA spring break)
Course Format: Hybrid
Location: Main Campus
Tuition: $195

England during the reign of Victoria is famous for industrial, scientific, and technological advances, as well as sexual repression. But it was also an era when the ghost story – and its extensions in longer fictions during one of the heydays of the English novel – flourished in print just as old traditions about the spirit world were being called into question by the many supposed “progresses” of the day. This seminar sets out to explain both the wide range of ghost stories during the time before and after Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in 1843 (which will be included) and the many ways that “ghostliness” was incorporated into seemingly “realistic” Victorian fictions from Dickens to Henry James, partly through their reworkings of the earlier “Gothic” tradition in fiction and drama.

Required Reading

1. Cox, Michael, and R. A. Gilbert, eds. The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. Oxford UP, 2003. ISBN-10: 0192804472.

2. Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Carmilla. Ed. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan. Syracuse UP, 2013. ISBN-13: 978-0815-63311-2.

3. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Janice Carlisle. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1995. ISBN-13: 978-0312080822.

4. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford UP, 2008. ISBN-10: 0199535639.

5. Wells, H. G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. Signet Classics, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-045152-9893.

6. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Peter G. Beidler. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. ISBN-13: 978-0312-59706-1.

Meet Your Instructor

Professor

JERROLD E. HOGLE (Ph.D., Harvard University) is UA Distinguished Professor in English. Former President of the International Gothic Association and a Guggenheim, Mellon, and Huntington Library Fellow for research–and recent winner of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America–he has published widely on Romantic poetry and theater, literary and cultural theory, and the Gothic. In addition, he is the winner of many teaching awards.  

Location

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