Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction

Recent decades have seen a revival of scholarly interest in Gothic fiction. Critics are attracted to the genre’s exploration of irrationality, to its dark representation of the bourgeois family and of the psychological effects of social conflict. Because of this critical interest and because of the enduring popularity of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, the Gothic has become increasingly visible on college syllabi.

This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” gives information on available editions, anthologies, reference works, background sources, critical studies, films, and Web sites of value in teaching Gothic fiction. The second part, “Approaches,” contains twenty-eight essays that define the genre; examine its connections to history, philosophy, feminism, social criticism; show its different forms in England, Ireland, the United States; and probe its themes―including such motifs as ghosts, castles, entrapped heroines, and animated corpses.

Among the many authors discussed are Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison.

Diane Long Hoeveler is professor of English and coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Marquette University. She is author of Romantic Androgyny, Gothic Feminism, coauthor with Lisa Jadwin of Charlotte Brontë, and coeditor with Beth Lau of the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching Jane Eyre. She is past president of the International Conference of Romanticism. Tamar Heller is assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, assistant editor of Victorian Literature and Culture, and author of Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic and articles on Charlotte Brontë, Oliphant, Le Fanu, and Wharton. She has edited with Patricia Moran the essay collection Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women's Writing