AP/EN 4430 3.00
Global Gothic: Horror Literature from Around the World
An examination of global gothic literature, this course explores the literature of horror and terror in a variety of texts from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe. Texts are read and situated in their regional, national, and/or diasporic contexts and in relation to questions of colonial history, post/anticolonialism, race, and globalization. This course is reserved for students in Year 4 Honours.
This course decentres the gothic tradition from its British eighteenth-century context to consider the histories and transformations of horror literature around the world. We will consider traditions of gothic literature grounded in specific national, cultural, regional, or folkloric traditions as well as those that respond to, revise, or resist the Western tradition of gothic literature. Topics may include representations of the natural and the supernatural within literary contexts; definitions of horror and terror across global literature; the relationship between violent colonial or settler colonial history and global gothic literatures; and revised discourses of monstrosity in global gothic, among many possibilities. In reading gothic in its global contexts, students will have the opportunity to contest and reimagine established accounts of the gothic as they study gothic literature across multiple geographic lines.