Genre Trouble: The Challenges of Designing Modern and Contemporary Gothic Modules

Abstract

Formerly relegated to scheduled weeks on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) and its accompanying horrid novels, or else, considered only in passing in wider surveys of the Enlightenment in traditional English degrees (Powell and Smith 2006: 2; Hughes 2006: 16–18), the Gothic has, since the 1980s, crept its way into the syllabi of schools and universities and become a crucial literary mode. As the critical reputation and value of the Gothic have gone from strength to strength—especially since the foundation of the International Gothic Association in 1991 and the journal Gothic Studies in 1999—the desire to learn about it has also grown at an exponential rate.¹ The study of the Gothic first spread via specialised MA programmes in the UK and Ireland.² Andrew Smith identified four programmes that contained a significant amount of Gothic material in 2006: those provided by the Universities of Stirling, Glamorgan and Kingston in the UK, and by Trinity College Dublin in Ireland (Smith 2006: 182). To these, we must now add the MA English Studies: The Gothic, offered by Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), and the MA in Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture, offered by St Mary’s University, Twickenham, as well as MAs elsewhere that include at least one Gothic module (those offered by, for example, Birkbeck College (University of London), Lancaster University and the University of Hertfordshire).³ Since 2009, the Gothic has also been part of A-Level English literature options (Priest 2011), which has meant, firstly, that students come to BA degrees having some notional knowledge; secondly, that universities like Manchester Metropolitan now run A-Level Gothic Study days; and, thirdly, that Continuing Professional Development courses on the teaching of the Gothic have also begun to blossom.⁴ It is, currently, difficult to find degree programmes in the UK which do not teach the Gothic, however cursorily, as part of broader modules on Romanticism, the Enlightenment, Victorian fiction and the fin-de-siècle.⁵ The interest in contemporary permutations of the Gothic, especially since Catherine Spooner’s well-received book on the topic (2006), has also meant that universities increasingly have research expertise in this area to offer specific modules covering the Modern (twentieth century) and the Contemporary Gothic (post-millennial, generally, but also turn of the century).