For your final essay in this class, you are to write an 8-12 page research essay on one of the following works.  You must clear your topic with me, including sending in a topic paragraph (with well-crafted thesis) by 3/23.  The final essay will be due on 4/22. 

My expectations are that this will be an argumentative essay rather than an expository one; you are to analyze something about the text at hand rather than summarize what others have said.  All primary and secondary-text work will be cited in correct MLA format, including a Works Cited list.   I will further assume that this will be researched and drafted during the whole of the semester, rather than cobbled together at the last minute.

List of Supplemental Gothic Texts:

• Clive Barker
• William Beckford Vathek
• William Blatty The Exorcist
• Wilkie Collins The Woman in White
• Ray Bradbury Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol
• Henry James The Turn of the Screw
• Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk
• Charles Robert Maturin Melmoth the Wanderer
• Mervyn Peake Gormenghast
• Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Anne Rice
• Mary Shelley Frankenstein
• Stephen Sondheim Sweeney Todd
• Peter Straub Ghost Story
• Thomas Tryon Harvest Home; The Other
• HG Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Works not on the syllabus by authors who are  on the syllabus -- but check with me first!
   
• Short stories by:       
  • SV Benet
  • EA Poe
  • Ambrose Bierce
  • Guy de Maupassant
  • Katherine Anne Porter
  • Herman Melville
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • Walter de la Mare
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Franz Kafka
  • Lafcadio Hearn
  • Sheridan La Fanu
  • Nicolai Gogol
  • Daphne du Maurier
  • Flannery O'Connor