Course description

Enlightenment and modernity have conventionally marked the end of an era ripe with superstition, mysticism, and magic. However, with rise of objective, empiricist science in Britain came an outpouring literature concerned with the unexplainable and strange. From Coleridge’s The Ancyent Marinere to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” the literature of modernity is littered with impossible settings, ghostly hauntings, unaccountable transformations, and characters whose magnetic power fascinates and draws you into their tales. This course will survey a broad swath of British literature from the late-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, concentrating on how and why authors chose to write about the fantastic and fabulous in an age of rationality.