Gothic novels are obsessed with what gets left out of rational accounts of experience: fantastic or inexplicable events, feelings of terror, horror, and haunting, scenarios of vulnerability, violence, or pathological desire. In this course, we will ask: when or in what ways does the gothic provide an escape from everyday life? And, when and in what ways does it mirror aspects of psychological, political, or social reality? We will explore these questions by focusing on classic gothic fiction from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Our interests will be literary as well as political and psychological: we will think together about how gothic fiction shapes or challenges what we typically expect from novels, particularly at this nascent moment in the history of both the novel form and the gothic tradition. While we will supplement our readings with a small selection of contextual/critical material throughout the quarter, this course is conceived mainly as an opportunity to engage closely with the novels themselves.  (18th/19th)