ENG 447 - American Gothic

Semester Hours: 4

What macabre anxieties lurk in the shadows of the American psyche? Why is the American literary imagination-an imagination ostensibly born of Enlightenment ideals-obsessed with the horrific, the insane, and the grotesque? This course will devote special emphasis to these and other questions related to how the Gothic literary mode became, and remains, so popular in America. In addition to viewing a particularly spooky film, we will read disturbing works by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, H. P. Lovecraft, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and others.