Framing the Gothic: Portraits in Literature

Literature, especially Gothic literature, reverberates with shadows, ghosts and echoes of the dead, often found in the timelessness of the portrait.

The painted image’s fixed, mimetic qualities render the subject immortal, creating an uncanny effect of making the dead, or absent sitter, seem ‘eternally present’.

From the Victorian re-working of the Faustian myth in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, to Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, this course will examine how a portrait’s doppelgänger qualities have provided writers with an infallible motif for symbolising conflict between the real and the metaphysical.

You will examine a range of literary prose depicting the portrait as Gothic motif in a variety of in-house lectures, seminars and interactive workshops, where you will explore the adaptability of the literary portrait, from functioning as time machine and supernatural portal, to embodying evil and lamenting absence.

Included in the course is a visit to the portraiture section in Cardiff’s National Museum.

Learning and teaching

There will be two-hour meetings once a week (20 contact hours in all) which will include discussions, exercises, lectures and workshops. There may also be audio-visual clips and students might be directed to some relevant podcasts

Online provision will be made available through Learning Central with relevant links to resources, class handouts and PowerPoint presentations.

Syllabus:

• Defining Beauty: Victorian femme fatale in portraits
• Hedonism and Vanity: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Horror Within: Psychoanalysis and the portrait
• The Evil without: Villainy and portraiture

Coursework and assessment

The basis of assessment will be a portfolio consisting of a close analysis of a passage from Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray alongside an essay engaging with critical debates in Gothic fiction.

Up to 2000 words.

Reading suggestions

Primary Texts

• Vernon Lee, Hauntings (Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2011)
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Oval Portrait, available at https://poestories.com/read/ovalportrait
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Recommended texts

• Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996)
• A.S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Vintage, 2002)
• Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
• Vernon Lee, ‘The Blame of Portraits’, Hortus Vite: Essays on the Gardening of Life (Teddington: Echo Library, 2008)
• Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)

Library and computing facilities

As a student on this course you are entitled to join and use the University’s library and computing facilities. Find out more about using these facilities.

Accessibility

Our aim is access for all. We aim to provide a confidential advice and support service for any student with a long term medical condition, disability or specific learning difficulty. We are able to offer one-to-one advice about disability, pre-enrolment visits, liaison with tutors and co-ordinating lecturers, material in alternative formats, arrangements for accessible courses, assessment arrangements, loan equipment and dyslexia screening.