This course traces the rise of Gothic literature in Britain from the middle of the eighteenth century through the end of the Romantic era. Students will explore the genre’s abiding concerns with gender identity and supernatural phenomena in order to understand how Gothic works (fiction, poetry, drama) challenged and shaped conceptions of authority, morality, nature, sexuality, and aesthetic judgment in eighteenth-century society. Gothic texts by Coleridge, Keats, Lewis, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, P.B. Shelley, Walpole, and Wollstonecraft may be read alongside central philosophical works of the Enlightenment and modern critical readings on gender, sexuality, and Gothic and Romantic literature.