ENG 4934-0002 Summer 2024 - Ward

As Markman Ellis observes in History of the Gothic, 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 demonstrating the intersections between the gothic and the “horrors” of slavery and its legacies—works published before AND after British abolition. Texts covered include “Isle of Devils” 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 anti-slavery activist Robert Wedderburn; The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), a persistently popular twentieth-century Jamaican gothic potboiler; Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute (1955), a mid-century “Ghost Story in the Old-Fashioned Manner”; Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys’s re-writing of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and its famous madwoman in the attic; Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988), a depiction of early twentieth-century village life and the struggle against zombification; Anthony Winkler’s The Duppy (1997), an iconoclastic, irreverent satire on the Jamaican “post”colonial condition; and, interspersed throughout the semester, stories from Pauline Melville’s Migration of Ghosts, a collection whose gothic overtones reflect the haunting legacy of slavery and colonialism. We’ll also examine examples of gothic cinema about and from the Caribbean.

This course meets the Senior Seminar Capstone requirement.