Moodle

The Faerie Queene, the magnum opus of Edmund Spenser, is the most important epic poem of the Elizabethan age. Its first three books were published in 1590, and the second three in 1596. Of the planned seventh book, only the two Mutabilitie Cantos are extant. Following its very own logic, The Faerie Queene, written in allegorical mode and consisting of multiple Arthurian plots and characters, is a glorification of Queen Elizabeth I and England and a manifestation of the beauty and power of the English language. In this seminar, we will get to know The Faerie Queene both through some contextualising and through extended close readings.

Text:  Edmund Spenser. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, Toshiyuki Suzuki and Shohachi Fukada. 2nd edition. Longman, 2006.   ISBN 9781405832816

Most primary texts contain depictions of violence, some of it sexualised.

After the Second World War, the Gothic continued to haunt the anglophone world, in literature, films, TV-series, music, fashion and other sites of cultural production. It kept metamorphosing according to the cultural conditions, fears and desires of the times. New forms of the Gothic were created by (and in turn fed into) a heightened interest in the workings of the human psyche as well as political and cultural developments, for instance totalitarianism, consumerism and the cold-war threat of nuclear annihilation.

In this lecture course, we will analyse selected Gothic texts – in literature, but also films and rock/pop songs –  from 1945 to the early 1990s, for instance by David Lean, Mervyn Peake, J. R. R. Tolkien, Terence Fisher, Shirley Jackson, Alfred Hitchcock, Geezer Butler, Ken Russell, Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson, Stephen King, Brian de Palma, Stanley Kubrick, James Herbert, Angela Carter, Ridley Scott, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Hill, Iain Banks, Toni Morrison, Tim Burton, Robert Smith and Tim Pope, Francis Ford Coppola, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Donna Tartt.

There will be a final test (45 mins) in the second half of the last lecture, which will be held on 2 February 2026.

Texts:

All texts to be read in preparation for the lectures will be made available.