The Gothic might be called a fundamentally 'queer' genre: hauntings, monsters, and the rising dead trouble our preconceptions and resist neat definitions and boundaries of existence. These narratives present transgressions, and the tensions between the familiar and the different. The 'first wave' of the genre produced texts as different as The Old English Baron and The Monk - the former a historical family saga that explores a homosocial society, the latter a sprawling pot-boiler that includes cross-dressing demons, murder, and incest. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray considers whether queerness is a challenge to the supposed natural order of things. More recently, queer creatives, like Poppy Z Brite and Bryan Fuller, have used the genre of terror and horror to explore how desires can be dangerous, and how danger can itself be desired.

This course explores how different understandings of 'queer' are present in Gothic texts throughout its long and horrifying history, how villains are recurrently queer coded, and how Gothic texts have the capacity for exploring difference in both problematic and liberating ways.

Related study trip

Day trip to see the remains of London's most gothic cemetery at Highgate and Strawberry Hill House, transformed into 'a little Gothic castle' by Horace Walpole, man of letters and son of England's first Prime Minister.

ASE reserves the right to change the content of course-specific study trips where necessary.