Gothic Literature as Climate Fiction

Abstract

This course introduces the 19th cent. Gothic unconventionally, as speculative proto-climate fiction. Tracing patterns of socio-/ecological repression, we will examine the climatological sublime in key texts and in their technologies of production to develop a deeper understanding of early attitudes towards environmental collapse, potentially generating vital insights for climate research today.

Objective

- An understanding of the history and characteristics of Gothic literature per se and as climate/science fiction, and of the genres’ technologies of production - An understanding of the texts’ socio-historical role as proto-climate fiction, esp. in relation to contemporary scientific development - An ability to articulate a strong critical response to the material and its present-day implications

Content

This course features a range of Gothic texts from the late Romantic and Victorian periods and reads them as trail-blazing speculative texts that can be termed proto-climate fiction. In close readings using textual tools from various speculative genres, we will trace the impact of ecological and related social oppression in these texts: we will identify foreshadowed environmental and social collapse within cross-temporal hauntings, for example, as the sublime return of the repressed, and in thinly veiled visceral reactions to environmental manipulation. In doing so, we will challenge contemporary perceptions of climate awareness within socio-cultural history, considering these texts as vital climate fiction avant la lettre. This course will also be of particular interest to students in the natural sciences, technology, engineering, informatics, and architecture due to its interdisciplinary socio-historical analysis. For example, particular emphasis will be placed on the role of knowledge and its control within these texts, using genre-related narrative devices to critique traditional modes of understanding. Moreover, the central focus will be on examining interdisciplinary socio-technological understandings of environmental collapse in a wide range of 19th-century literature: from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which revolutionised the perception of humanity’s technological impact on natural and constructed environments, via Shelley’s philosophical plague-and-climate dystopia The Last Man and Charlotte Brontë’s proto-ecofeminist Jane Eyre, which fundamentally challenged human-nature relations along existential and sociological lines, to the influential ‘Urban Gothic’ texts of the fin de siècle (including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula), which presented powerful multidisciplinary critiques of humanity’s social and environmental role following the industrial revolution. We will examine the significance of the Gothic as speculative proto-climate fiction in these and other pertinent interdisciplinary ways: for example, within the genre’s complex association with Gothic Revival architecture in opposition to the Neoclassical style of the Enlightenment; regarding the fascinating shifting understandings of self, other and the environment in the rapidly developing psychoanalytic and medical fields of the period; and, perhaps most fundamentally, in tracing the overarching connection between the environmental Gothic and science fiction as its direct successor, revealing uniquely constructed shared capacities for socio-technological and environmental critique. Lastly, the course will contextualise its analyses through an ongoing focus on the technologies of textual production: it will investigate the texts’ material history of communication to develop deeper insights into the socio-political relevance of environmental Gothic text production, defining form/materiality and reception as crucial to its socio-historical interpretation. For example, we will explore the Gothic’s key role in the immense growth of the popular fiction market in the early 19th century and its relation to social awareness-raising; the genre-shaping historical connection between the ‘graveyard poets’ and ancient poetic forms as well as environmental folk poetry; and the Gothic’s defining association with satire and plagiarism (for example in the form of ‘Gothic bluebooks’ and chapbooks) in relation to text distribution and associated socio-environmental awareness. Overall, this course will thereby present an important challenge to commonly held assumptions regarding the historical genesis and development of socio-cultural climate collapse awareness, thus potentially opening the door to vital new insights regarding interdisciplinary communication of the climate crisis in the present day.

Resources