Walpole, Strawberry Hill

Awesome tour experience provided by the wonderful people at the Walpole Library at Yale:
http://lwlimages.library.yale.edu/strawberryhill/tour_home.html

Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto

Title page of the first edition: notice that the book is pitched as a translation from Italian.

Title page of a later edition: from the second edition on, Walpole explained his work as "Gothic Story."

An illustration from The Castle of Otranto:

Southern Gothic

I had the pleasure of reading Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom last year for school.  Both are written in what is known as the Southern Gothic style. Southern Gothic seems to come into existence in the early decades of the 20th century and is very concerned with the predicament of identity in the South.  The South is economically anemic and culturally torn by the issues of civil rights.  Southern civilization has been toppled; Southern Gothic explores the ruins.

I am no expert, but it seems there are some surface parallels I can draw.  First, Southern Gothic makes use of the grotesque, the horrific, the decrepit just as writers within the Gothic tradition do.  Second, Southern Gothic fixates on ruins, both cultural and architectural(see picture).

 Lastly, I would just put in a good word for Flannery O'Connor's short stories. They are short (duh) and great and will give you a better idea of the style of Southern Gothic than I can convey.  Also, I speak as a lifelong northerner, so I certainly invite correction as this is a living literary tradition deeply rooted in southern culture.

here is a link to more picture

Reviews of Confessions

From The Eclectic Review (1823):

From the British Review (1821):

Gothic Resources

 A great site from CUNY, Brooklyn (particularly strong on literary terms):
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/index.html

Short but helpful remarks from our friends at Norton:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_2/welcome.htm

De Quincey Materials

 De Quincey's portrait, provided by the National Portrait Gallery website:
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01801/Thomas-de-Quincey?search=ss&sText=de+quincey&LinkID=mp01259&role=sit&rNo=0

An intriguing project that maps the London of De Quincey's Confessions:
http://drc.usask.ca/projects/eng803/joel/dequincey/dequincey.html

The Sublime

We'll be speaking in a number of later classes about poems that overtly or implicitly discuss the sublime.  It's a much debated concept in the Romantic period, and one of its key early investigators is none other than Burke.  Here are few sites to supplement our discussions in class:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_1/burke.htm
http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/sublime/sublimeov.html

Home at Grasmere

We've now reached the point in Wordsworth's career when he is firmly ensconced in the Lake District.  Found here:

The vale of Grasmere:

The Wordsworth reside at Dove Cottage until 1808:
http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/history/index.asp?pageid=36

Clips from Pandaemonium, Film on Wordy and Coleridge

Frost at Midnight and Coleridge and the Wordsworth talk poetics: