EN2N1/EN3N1 Haunted Britain

Sample syllabus (TBC by the end of summer term)

Unit 1: Nuclear Gothic

H.G. Wells, The World Set Free,1914;
Leslie Mitchell, Gay Hunter,1935;
John Wyndham, The Chrysalids,1955;
Wr. Troy Kennedy Martin, dir. Martin Campbell, Edge of Darkness,1985;
Alex Lockwood, The Chernobyl Privileges, 2019

Unit 2: Folk Horror

Peter Dickinson,The Weathermonger, 1968;
Wr. Anthony Shaffer, dir. Robin Hardy,The Wicker Man, 1974;
Doris Lessing,Memoirs of a Survivor,1975;
Lucy McKnight Hardy, Water Shall Refuse Them, 2019.

Unit 3: Neo-Victorian Hauntings or Historical Crimes/Fiction - possible texts

Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones
J. G. Farrell The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
Peter Akroyd, Dan Leno and the Lime-House Golem (1994) or Kim Newman, Anno Dracula (1992)
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002) or Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent (2016)
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008)

Unit 4: The Children are the Future[?] - possible texts:

Frances Hodgson Burnett,The Secret Garden (1911) or Richard Hughes, A Highwind in Jamaica (1929)
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
P.D. James, Children of Men (1992)
Jamilla Gavin and Helen Edmundson, Coram Boy (2005) or Helen Oyeyemi, White is For Witching (2009)
Jonathan Stroud, The Screaming Staircase (2013)
His House, dir. Remi Weekes (2020)

 

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Further Reading

Rosario Arias, "Haunted places, haunted spaces: The spectral return of Victorian London in Neo-Victorian fiction."

Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (2009): 133-156.

Chloé Germaine Buckley, Twenty-first-century Children's Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Peter Buse and Andrew Stott. Ghosts: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1999.

Jessica Cox, "Neo-Gothic Sensations". Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction (2019): 41-72.

Paul Darby, and Niall Finneran. "Spectral Nation: Characterizing British Haunted Landscapes through the Lens of the 1970s ‘Ghost Gazetteer’and a Folk Horror Perspective." Folklore 133.3 (2022): 311-333.

Daniel Darvay, Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. Springer, 2016.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life. Zero, 2014

Jerome De Groot, Remaking History: The past in contemporary historical fictions. Routledge, 2015.

Jessica Gildersleeve, "The Spectre and the Stage: Reading and Ethics at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, the neo-Victorian, and the Gothic." Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18.3 (2013): 99-108.

eds. Anna Jackson, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats, The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders. Routledge, 2013.

Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past. Stanford University Press, 2017.

eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Imagination and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth Century, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012)

Richard Littler, Discovering Scarfolk. Ebury, 2014

Esther Peeren. "Ghosts of the Missing: Multidirectional Haunting and Self-Spectralization in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park", in The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (2014): 144-179.

Benjamin Poore, "The Villain-effect: distance and ubiquity in neo-Victorian popular culture." Neo-Victorian Villains. Brill, 2017. 1-48.

Adam Scovell, Folk Horror. Auteur, 2017

Katy Shaw, Hauntology. Palgrave, 2018

Grafton Tanner, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock. Repeater, 2021