ENG 4934 Summer 2023 Ward

Great Britain’s position as the dominant slave trading nation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exerted a clear influence on the development of gothic fiction. In this course, we will read a variety of texts that demonstrates the intersections between the gothic and the “horrors” of slavery—works published before and after the abolition of that institution. Texts covered include “Isle of Devils” and excerpts from Journal of a West India Proprietor by Matthew Lewis, author of one of the most famous eighteenth-century gothic novels, The Monk, and heir to two large Jamaican sugar estates and the enslaved people who labored on them; writings by the Jamaican-born radical preacher and activist Robert Wedderburn; the little known Caribbean novel, Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), which deals with colonial anxieties over African religious practices and slave insurrections; The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), a persistently popular Jamaican gothic potboiler; Erna Brodber’s Myal, a depiction of early twentieth-century Jamaican village life and the struggle against zombification; Pauline Melville’s Migration of Ghosts, a contemporary short story collection reflecting the haunting legacy of slavery and colonialism; and, finally, Marlon James’s Book of Night Women, an historical novel depicting an uprising led by enslaved women on an eighteenth-century Jamaican sugar estate. We’ll also watch White Zombie, the 1932 Hollywood film that introduced the figure of the zombie to mainstream American audiences.

Our examination of these works will draw on a number of theoretical approaches—e.g., postcolonialist, feminist, and materialist theories.