The Gothic might be called a fundamentally 'queer' genre, with its hauntings, monsters, and the un/dead that trouble our preconceptions, definitional certainties, and even the very boundaries of existence. Critics have long recognised the exchange of influence between theory and the Gothic - one suggesting Queer theory owes the genre a 'debt', another that we can read the work of Freud through the lens of the Gothic as easily as we read fiction through a psychological lens. Gothic narratives are all about transgressions, the tensions between the familiar and the different, and the shifting boundaries of the normative as it is continually constructed and reconstructed in modern society, and about the terror and horror produced by the enforcement of those boundaries. 

This course explores how different understandings of 'queerness' have been depicted in Gothic texts throughout its long and horrifying history, how creatives and critics from a range of marginalised perspectives have used the genre and its tropes to explore identity in their work, and how Gothic texts have the capacity for representing difference in both problematic and liberating ways.

Related study trip

Day trip to see The National Archives 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.