Making Strange: Teaching 19th-Century Gothic and Fantastic Literature

Abstract

Abstract How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the ‘immanent frame’ of a secular self-sufficient view of reality? This article describes two modules studying non-realist literary modes—Gothic and fantasy writing—which seek to do this. God and the Gothic reverses the psychological turn in 19th-century Gothic to examine the way Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of the fantastic hesitation can be used to enable an opening to the transcendent and offers a new way of narrating Victorian Gothic through Gaskell, Oliphant, and Machen. Religion and Fantasy invokes the defamiliarising technique of Victor Shklovsky and the magic idealism of Novalis to connect German and British imaginative writing from Coleridge, through John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Christina Rossetti.