NINETEENTH-CENTURY THRILLERS

This class will investigate the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel is shaped by the forces of horror, sensation, suspense and the supernatural. We will ask how the melodramatic imagination, the rhetoric of monstrosity, and the procedures of detection mark high narrative realism with the signs of cultural anxieties building up around nineteenth-century revolution, industrialization, capitalism, bigamy, Catholicism and immigration. Looking at representative samples of the Romantic neo-gothic novel, mid-century ghost stories, the highly popular and controversial sensation novels of the 1860’s along with their spectacular iterations on the Victorian stage, we will come away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the intersection between the novel and popular entertainment. Readings will probably include Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Brontë’s Villette, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Collins’s The Woman in White, Dickens’s Bleak House, Stoker’s Dracula, plays by Boucicault, Hazelwood, Lewis, and Wood, and ghost stories by Edwards, Gaskell, Hood, and Mulock.