106-043 The Victorian 'Supernatural'

Usually 25 points of first year English, see Prerequisites, or first year women's studies, see Prerequisites.

This subject provides an introduction to the discourse of the supernatural in popular literary discourses of the Victorian period. Students will read well-known literary texts, ghost stories, sensation novels and science fiction in the context of Victorian anxieties about sexual transgression, madness, race, disease, and the death of God. The subject asks students to consider the ways in which contemporary theorisations of the body, gender, race and modes of cultural production can help us to understand the preoccupations of Victorians with ghosts, spiritual forces, mesmerism and monstrous doubles. This subject enables students to appreciate the close relationship that existed in Victorian culture between literary discourse and the discourses of science, politics, medicine, philosophy, theology and sociology; and to produce a historically and theoretically informed account of an aspect of the role of the supernatural or science fiction in Victorian culture.

Class participation, and written work totalling 4000 words.

• M Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret.
• W Collins, The Woman in White.
• C Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
• J M Falkner, The Lost Stradivarius.
• H James, The Turn of the Screw.
• S Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly.
• R L Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories.