The Gothic Arts Course

with Dr Joan Passey

Dr Joan Passey opens the course by asking what on earth ‘Gothic’ means — a word that stretches from the tribes who sacked Rome to cathedral spires, The Cure and Netflix’s Wednesday. She unpacks Horace Walpole’s gloriously absurd The Castle of Otranto (1764), with its giant helmet falling from the sky and its fake ‘found manuscript’ preface, then turns to Ann Radcliffe, the ‘Mighty Enchantress’ who split fear into terror and horror, and the stormy, blood-soaked coastal sonnets of Charlotte Smith.

• How a Roman insult for ‘barbarians’ became a genre
• Why the first Gothic novel pretended to be a found manuscript
• Ann Radcliffe’s crucial distinction between terror and horror
• How Charlotte Smith’s poetry found horror on the English coast

with Dr Joan Passey

Passey turns to the High Victorian Gothic and the fears that fed it: penny dreadfuls blamed for rising crime, séances at Osborne House, and Dr John Elliotson’s mesmerism demonstrations on female patients — vouched for by Charles Dickens. Tracing phrenology, early blood transfusion and the birth of the mad scientist, she uncovers George Eliot’s little-known Gothic novella The Lifted Veil and offers several readings of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

• Why the Victorians blamed penny dreadfuls for a rise in crime
• Mesmerism, séances and the Victorian science of the supernatural
• How early blood transfusions fed the vampire imagination
• Queer, evolutionary and extractivist readings of Jekyll and Hyde

with Dr Joan Passey

Passey gives a lively crash course in the psychoanalysis that reshaped twentieth-century horror — Freud’s unconscious, repression and the uncanny (illustrated, unforgettably, with the film of Cats and The Polar Express) and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection — before mapping the American Gothic from Poe’s The Raven to Toni Morrison. At its heart is Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and McCarthyism, The Haunting of Hill House, and the feral young poisoner of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

• Freud’s uncanny explained — and why The Polar Express unsettles us
• Kristeva’s abjection, or the horror of skin on custard
• What makes the American Gothic different from the British
• How Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery paved the way for folk horror

with Dr Joan Passey

Passey digs up the vampire’s long history — from Lilith and the bloated revenants of Eastern European folklore to the eighteenth-century ‘vampire epidemic’ and modern theories of porphyria and rabies — and follows it through Coleridge’s Christabel, Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Florence Marryat’s overlooked The Blood of the Vampire (1897). She then returns to the Villa Diodati in 1816, the rain-soaked summer that gave us both Polidori’s The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

• Why folklore’s first vampires were bloated corpses, not seducers
• The sapphic vampires of Christabel and Carmilla
• How Polidori’s grudge against Byron created the sexy vampire
• Reading Frankenstein through the life of Mary Wollstonecraft

with Dr Joan Passey

Passey shows how gender and sexuality have shaped the Gothic from the very start: the ‘female Gothic’ of trapped heroines and tyrannical patriarchs, Bluebeard’s bloody chamber, Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason, The Yellow Wallpaper and the Victorian diagnosis of hysteria. She then gives a lucid introduction to queer theory — from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Judith Butler — and uses it to read Dorian Gray, Dracula, Frankenstein, Rebecca, The Turn of the Screw and M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ in a startling new light.

• Why Bluebeard’s forbidden room haunts Jane Eyre and Rebecca
• How Victorian diagnoses of hysteria fed the female Gothic
• The key ideas of queer theory, clearly explained
• Why Frankenstein became a powerful metaphor for trans experience

with Dr Joan Passey

In the final session Passey returns to the course’s big question — what is the Gothic? — and follows it off the page: into goth subculture, The Cure and Nick Cave, Alexander McQueen and the Met Gala, Get Out and the boom in folk horror, and the new cannibal, fungal and digital Gothics. Along the way, Ursula K. Le Guin skewers literary snobbery with a zombie, and Joan closes with a reading list and practical prompts for anyone who wants to write Gothic fiction of their own.

• What goth music, fashion and subculture inherit from Gothic fiction
• Why cannibals, fungi and the internet are today’s Gothic monsters
• How folk horror punctures our nostalgia for the countryside
• Practical prompts for writing your own Gothic fiction