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 crucial aspects of psychological, political, or social reality? We will explore these questions by focusing on classic gothic novels from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century (by Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Shelley, and Bronte); we will likely conclude with a contemporary take on the genre. (B, F)