Investigates how the Victorians used the Gothic – a genre which explores the macabre, the supernatural, the uncanny – to examine, represent, and re-imagine the complexities of their own age,  to play out in the realm of fantasy the challenges of urban life, of science, of empire, of shifting definitions of sexuality, gender, and art.   This course will examine these questions by looking first at the 18^th-century and Romantic roots of the Gothic and then at a range of Victorian texts.  Finally, we’ll consider how Gothic modes and forms have lived on and been appropriated in 20^th and 21^st-century popular culture.  Throughout the course, contemporary critical approaches to the Gothic will provide us with a variety of tools for reading.  As a seminar and a research course, this class will emphasize reading criticism and theory and developing each student’s skills as a critical writer in response to primary as well as critical, theoretical, and popular texts.