Dark Shadows: Nineteenth-Century Versions of Evil

Instructor: Professor Suzanne Flynn
                 Department of English

An exploration of some of the dark literature written during the nineteenth century by British and American authors. From the early nineteenth-century Romantic and Gothic movements through the late nineteenth-century Spiritualist and Decadent movements, the literature of this period often leans towards the fantastic, the gothic, and the supernatural. These works reveal the fears and insecurities that arose as the Industrial Revolution and Darwinian theories undermined the public's sense of what could be known and understood in the world around them. We will read, discuss, and analyze such works as the supernatural poetry of Coleridge, the macabre stories and poems of Poe, the disturbing poetry of Browning, the haunted tales of Hawthorne, and the ghostly fiction of Henry James. This course will fulfill the first-year writing requirement and may be counted towards a major or minor in English.