Courses

This is a course about the early English novel’s traffic in the supernatural and the fantastic. It tests the hypothesis that the most pressing challenge facing that emergent literary form across the eighteenth century was how to explain the supernatural. This claim makes the concerns of Gothic fiction more central than historians of the novel typically suppose. The phrase explained supernatural itself comes from the Gothic, specifically from the work of Ann Radcliffe, whose influential novels of the 1790s find natural causes for seemingly otherworldly incidents. Matthew Lewis represents a different alternative from the same period. His sensationalistic work The Monk (1796) keeps the supernatural obscure, inexplicable, and perverse. Since the Romantic era, readers have frequently distinguished between Radcliffe’s approach and Lewis’s, with significant consequences for the gendering of the Gothic. But we won’t take this distinction for granted, and we will trace novelistic efforts to explain the supernatural back through earlier novels. While these narratives appeared before Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764)—almost universally called the first Gothic novel in English—they already ask recognizably Gothic questions about how to account for the unaccountable. Of special interest to us will be moments when these early novels can’t quite decide what they want to do with the fantastic or the marvelous: enjoy it, seal it off elsewhere (in a Catholic past or an exoticized East, for instance), rationalize it, or redeem it.

Instead of sticking to strict chronology, we’ll start with some concepts and theoretical problems from the period and read an early Radcliffe novel together. Then we’ll circle back and briefly acquaint ourselves with some different channels through which the supernatural fed into English prose fiction of the eighteenth century. Working our way forward to the late-century Gothic craze and Jane Austen’s reaction to it in Northanger Abbey, we’ll study two long, influential novels that expose deep insecurities about the modernizing process of excluding spirits and devils, or even knights and damsels, from the realm of imaginative possibility.