Gothic Castles in British Literature - From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Since the eighteenth century, the Gothic has undergone many changes as a genre. What has not changed, though, is that spaces, in particular architectural spaces, are defining elements of the Gothic. Since the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic’s uncanny castles, ruined abbeys, haunted mansions and decaying country houses have set the Gothic’s scenes. These buildings also offer multiple starting points for research, for instance socio-economic, political, ethnic and gender topics.

We will first discuss Gothic as a historical genre before we turn to theories of spaces and spatiality. We will then enter on a historical tour of Gothic literature on which we will read excerpts from selected Gothic texts with a view to their (re-)presentations of places and spaces. Our primary texts will be Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1945) and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009). We will contextualise both novels and closely read excerpts from them, focusing on how they construct their twentieth-century versions of the Gothic castle.

Texts (Please buy and read the following editions):

Peake, Mervyn. Titus Groan. Vintage Classics, 1998. ISBN:  9780749394929

Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger. Virago, 2010. ISBN:  9781844086061