English - Elective Subject, topic 4: The Fantastic in Literature: From Book to Film

The nineteenth century was a tumultuous age of transformation, where conceptions of space and time unravelled before people’s eyes. The development of railways and steamboats made it possible for Britons to travel great distances, and at speeds previously unimaginable. The construction of largescale telegraphic networks allowed for long-distance communication at the blink of an eye.  The advent of scientific theories such as Darwinian evolution and thermodynamics drastically changed the way people saw the natural world. There were so many new scientific theories and technologies that seemed to function by the use of invisible energies that ideas about the fantastic became rampant in cultural discourses. It was within this ever-changing social climate that interests in the occult, the gothic, wonderous, and the horrible flourished. This course will examine the historical context of ghost stories, creature fiction, high fantasy, and supernatural horror, and ask how different media – books, film, graphic novels, etc. – transform the extraordinary in adaptation. We will look at scientific and technological inspiration, Victorian occultists, and adaptation theory.