But what does “adapting” the gothic really mean? And just how exceptional was the American gothic? The first English gothic novel—Henry Walpole’s campy 1764 The Castle of Otranto—emerged in response to an animated 18th-century British debate about whether fiction could be morally improving if it wasn’t true to life.

The gothic has come a long way since its mid-eighteenth-century origins, but what paths has it traveled?  How did an emphatically British genre become an origin point for American fiction, a staple of African-American narrative form, and Hollywood’s bread and butter?

In this course, we’ll read gothic fiction from its beginnings to its most recent incarnations, but much of our literary reading will be paired with examples of the gothic in contemporary American pop culture--television and movies--in order to think critically about why and how the gothic’s obsessions with spectrality, history, communal boundaries, gender and racial uncertainty, political dominance, and literary authority continue to resurface in different media throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.