OLLI 1067 - Haunted Enlightenment: The Supernatural in 18th–Early 19th Century Literature and Art
Course Description
From ghosts and apparitions to monstrous creations and prophetic visions, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were rich with supernatural imagination. This course explores how writers, playwrights, and artists of the period used the supernatural not simply for entertainment, but to grapple with profound questions about reason, science, morality, and the limits of human understanding. We’ll trace how the Enlightenment’s faith in rationality gave way to Romantic fascination with mystery, emotion, and the unseen.
Across four weeks, we’ll examine a range of works and media including Gothic fiction, Romantic poetry, drama, essays, and visual art. Texts and artists may include Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Henry Fuseli, alongside key dramatic works that brought supernatural themes to the stage and shaped audience expectations of fear, suspense, and spectacle. Together, we’ll consider how these works continue to influence modern ideas of the supernatural, horror, and the uncanny.
Tentative weekly sequence:
Week 1: Origins of the Gothic Imagination
Week 2: Monsters, Science, and the Uncanny Body
Week 3: Poetry, Ballads, and the Spectral Imagination
Week 4: Supernatural Visual Culture & Legacy
This class meets online over Zoom. Class recordings will be available.