I’m returning to this site after a long absence mostly as a place to post the reading list for my Senior Seminar course on The Gothic. I’ve had a few people on the Twitter machine request it, and I thought it’d be easier (and more useful) to direct them to a stable list rather than just tweeting it back at them. So here is what we’re doing:

Long Works

• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
• Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
• Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

Short Works

• Charles Perrault, “Bluebeard”
• Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”
• Neil Gaiman, “The Hidden Chamber”
• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-paper”
• William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”
• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
  • “The Rats in the Walls”

Critical Work

• David Punter, Introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to The Gothic and The Arts.
• Mary Shelley Introduction to Frankenstein
• Mark Edmundson, selection from Nightmare on Main Street
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel”
• H.P. Lovecraft, Selection from Supernatural Horror in Literature
• Nnedi Okorafor, “Lovecraft’s racism & The World Fantasy Award statuette, with comments from China Miéville”
• Stephen King, selection from Danse Macabre