You already know the elements--the ruined castle, the brooding villain, the disembodied music, the overembodied heroine--but do you know where they come from?  This seminar will study fashions in eighteenth-century art and architecture (the sublime and the picturesque, grottoes and rent-a-hermits); in linguistics, history, and archeology (fragments, relics, antiquities, genealogies); and in various kinds of politics (revolutionary, religious, and sexual), in order to contextualize our readings of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve’s rewriting of Otranto, The Old English Baron (1777); Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1785); Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1797); Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817); and that great parody, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818).  Requirements: a lot of reading, attendance (10%), participation (10%), short weekly commentaries (10%), a presentation (20%), and a research paper (12-15pp., 50%).