McGill.CA / Architecture History and Theory / Program curriculum / Master's curriculum

Architectural Theory Seminar II

ARCH 653B
Studies in Architectural Romanticism

Prerequisite: Arch 652A

4 Credits

Topic for Winter 2009: The Sentient House

We must understand dwelling in its most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence.
- Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 220, convolut I4,4.

Profondeur de l'espace, allégorie de la profondeur du temps.
- Charles Baudelaire, Paradis Artificiels, 1860

Following upon Theory I, which examined the structure of human consciousness as described by the philosophical tradition of phenomenology and hermeneutics, Theory II seeks to develop a critical method of architectural analysis from these reflections by turning attention to nineteenth-century architecture thought and practice. By mixing history with theoretical reflection, the seminar wishes to generate a crossing of perspectives, the nineteenth century being an ideal field for such conversational hermeneutic. Close to us, yet distinctly foreign in architectural terms, it presents with great acuity the phenomena of "distance in closeness": providing the foundations for modernism, nineteenth century architecture is simultaneously a fall backwards, “lapsing” into historicism and revivalisms. Even today when every past has been recuperated twice over, architects still feel uneasy about the nineteenth century, a period that appears oddly inauthentic, a shameful interregnum in Western creativity. The opacity and oddness of the era, however, is intriguing, setting an interesting tension between attraction and repulsion. Martin Heidegger thought the period "the most obscure of all the centuries of the modern age up to now," (in “The Age of the World Picture”, 1938-1952), recognizing the way 19th-century philosophers were able to describe subjectivity in a form “almost unrecognizable” from Descartes’s original formulation. The “almost” is of course an essential qualifier as, according to Heidegger, no 19th-century philosopher (even Nietzsche) was ever able to overcome Descartes’ enclosing subjectivity. But he did recognize the greatness of 19th-century philosophy in dislodging human subjectivity out of the ego as with, for instance, Fichte’s infinite I, Hegel’s geist, Nietzsche’s will to power or Freud’s Id. Insofar as these various expanded models of subjectivity were attempts to get at the blind core of our modernity, they provide the general, if distant, philosophical background to ARCH653. In their heterogeneity, they initiated a process of dispersal of constructed systems that eventually lead to Heidegger, Lacan and post-structuralism. Philosophy was of course not the only discipline to pry open the pandora’s box of the self. Other forms of cultural expression, grappling with similar questions, were as or even more effective than philosophy in exploring the unrepresentable. Already in the late-eighteenth-century, Burke’s redefinition of the sublime in aesthetics described an altered state of consciousness conditioned by fear whereby man could absorb aspects of reality unknowable from an ordinary frame of reference. The Gothic novel, in which obscurity and terror is the ruling principle, is probably the literary tradition most in touch with Burke’s sublime and with the dark side of human subjectivity. It is also a literary genre well-known for its use of architecture as threshold mechanism for the fall into fantasy and terror.

This year’s seminar will focus upon the Gothic notion of the sentient house, a term referring generally to the haunted but which is specifically borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The house so dramatically portrayed in Poe’s short story is “sentient” in the literal sense of being capable of holding and projecting feelings: “the conditions of the sentience had been […] fulfilled in the method of collation of [its] stones,” and was made evident “in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere.” The “House of Usher” denoted both the family and the family mansion, an equivocation which renders perfectly the way the family was strangely and pathologically “enchained by certain superstitious impressions” to their dwelling. The Gothic mansion is ultimately less a discrete object than an atmospheric whirlpool, setting in motion a process of architectural empathy having terror at its basis. Rift with a disruptive, alien element at its core, the fissured dwelling holds the forces of the uncanny whereby mental projections and spatial characteristics mingle together in uncontrollable fashion.

I propose to use Poe’s story as a radical and critical script to understand 19th-century interiority. First, it can exemplify how the rise of bourgeois interiority was tied to new spatial practices. As Diana Fuss writes, “the compartmentalization of the bourgeois interior provides one of the necessary historical conditions for the romantic discovery of the self and for the philosophical exploration of interior life. […] Only as the eighteenth-century multi-purpose room gave way in the nineteenth century to specialized rooms, corridors, hallways, closets, and back-stairwells does an interior subject truly begins to emerge.” Such proliferation of intricate spaces can be traced back to eighteenth-century court society, but the ideology of the house as a solitary retreat—as the structural encasement of the self described by Walter Benjamin—comes fully into its own within nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Interiority then constitutes a new ontology as reassuring as it is disorienting. Entering a domestic interior in the nineteenth century was the crossing of a threshold as significant as the divide that separated the profane from the sacred in church architecture, or the living from the dead in funeral architecture. Ultimately, the development of bourgeois interiority subordinates exteriority by overflowing its bounds and subsuming everything in its path, the interior expanding without limits. (Fuss, 13)

Second, Poe’s story puts us in touch with the potentially disruptive nature of nineteenth-century interiors, a space where the subject-object division constitutive of our modernity looses its grip. The unshakable empathic bond between house and inhabitant redefines subjectivity in terms of a sensory identification with objects: house, furniture, clothing, colors, sounds and smells. But the sensory connection to the home does not lead to the harmonious existence one might expect. Roderick Usher (the main protagonist of Poe’s story) suffers instead from a “host of unnatural sensations,” a “morbid acuteness of the senses,” demonstrating, in a pathological form, how the mind’s penetration into matter in the modern interior destabilizes the normal boundaries of a domestic space—producing the basic condition for the liberation of the uncanny. But Poe’s unbounding of the self is not limited to the blurring of limits between subject and object; its crucial character lies in the splitting of the protagonist himself in two halves: the twin brother and sister, Roderick and Madeline, tied together with “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature.” This doubling—which, according to Freud, is the constitutive essence of the uncanny—is at the core of the story and the living source of the dread—especially after Madeline’s death and her burial in “one of the numerous vaults within the walls of the building” lying at great depth beneath. The feminine figure of Madeline, buried alive, acts as an “artificial unconscious” whose return from the crypt (through the mediation of a text) is the immediate cause of the “Fall of the House of Usher.” Madeline thus can stand in for the inherent disruption necessary for the maintenance of interior space, always won through the violence of exclusion and repression.

So it is that Poe’s story exposes with remarkable lucidity the character and consequences of the rise of the “Romantic” interior. According to Octavio Paz and Maurice Blanchot, Romanticism signals the era in Western consciousness where the freedom of subjectivity is fully recognized and experimented with, thus constituting experience as a form of fictional living. Blurring the limits between the fictional and the real—between representation and the unrepresentable (or the other)—interiority overflows causing an effusion of dream into real life. Gothic would then stand as the “mole” (Punter), undermining the false stabilities of the subject, disrupting the phantasmagoria of the nineteenth-century interior. Architecturally, Romanticism’s most vivid expression is the phenomena of “revivalism,” whereby the past is used as a space of fantasy for the redeployment of the modern self. (Goethe’s eulogy of Strasbourg Cathedral is a classic example of the operation.) The modern architect’s resuscitation of the past thus gives architectural expression to modernity’s inner dichotomy: living in two worlds simultaneously. Of all revivalisms, however, only one is really worthy of the name: modern Gothic, ie the resuscitation of the long-gone architecture of a barbaric age. Within nineteenth-century architectural discourse, the burial of Gothic (during the Renaissance) was described as a forceful and artificial suppression or repression of the true and living Christian architecture—and thus can be said to be a case of “live-burial” as was Madeline in Poe’s story. In that sense, the Gothic revival, as Gothic literature, was fueled by a dramatic sense of "dispossession" and was lived in a mode of “mourning.” Its recovery of the past is carried only in order to discover, deep down, a historicity essentially bound to the self—as an inner journey.

The seminar will concentrate its investigation around British architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852)—with John Ruskin, the most momentous figure in the history of the Gothic revival in England. Pugin was of course not the first to “practice” modern Gothic but he effected a profound change to the nature of the revival—indeed, one could claim that he is the first to have transformed neo-gothic into a revival proper, i.e. a resurrection: from being a simple issue of picturesque associations, Gothic became a matter of life, truth and religion; from being a select style for rich country houses, it was made into an instrument for the transformation of society. His enemies described “Puginism” as a fanatic movement led by a group of under-educated zealous bigots. In many ways, Pugin’s thought and work could be made to stand as the very opposite of the Gothic literary tradition introduced above: far from being a world teeming with irrational drives, ghosts or vampires, the medieval world described by Pugin is constructed along the dream image of social unity, cohesion and devotion, qualities that he believed was embodied directly in Gothic architecture. But it is paradoxically in his deployment of the watershed idea that architecture is the “moral” embodiment of a society, that Pugin establishes contact with the Gothic literary tradition: as he assumed that buildings have mental influences over its inhabitants—replacing a visual approach with a moral one—he posited the principle of “sentience” or architectural empathy. He went as far as thinking that specific buildings and spaces have special powers to cure specific bodily illnesses. His goal of reviving only the “purest” and “truest” Gothic in order to save society from moral degradation, springs from the conviction that architecture as it is practiced in England during his times had the reversed effect. Architecture is therefore haunted, the revival of Gothic becoming an exorcism of the monster lurking within modernity. In her recent biography, Rosemary Hill repeatedly emphasized how Pugin was scared of ghosts, how he dreaded being alone and how he bore an undertow of fear throughout his life. His monogram and French motto “En avant” which he liked to spread everywhere on the walls of his domestic spaces may be interpreted as a sign of that fear, “moving forward” meaning running away and deferral. The seminar will explore the paradoxes of these fears—the demonic, the hidden, the uncanny—embodied as they are in Pugin’s life and work as a Gothic revivalist. A bibliography is appended at the end of this course outline.

Seminar Evaluation

Class participation: 30 %
Term Paper: 70 %

Term Paper

For the seminar to bear directly upon architecture and in order to test our various thematic discussions, each student will carry an interpretative study of a particular work by A.N.W. Pugin. The term paper—written but also given orally in a final “colloquium” carried during the examination period—is the main course requirement. The work must demonstrate the highest standard of scholarly research skills, sophisticated interpretative imagination, and a clear critical position in light of some of the theoretical readings carried in class. The final text should not exceed 16 pages (typed, double space) and must adhere strictly to scholarly conventions.

The work will be conducted in five formal stages carried through the term:

  1. Week 4 (26 Jan.): First presentation—introduction of topic, brief review of the literature, of available documents and preliminary argument. (20 minutes each)
  2. Week 8 & 9 (2 and 9 March): Second presentation: argument development. (40 minutes each)
  3. Week 10- 13: Private meetings with instructor by appointment.
  4. Final oral presentations: 19 and 20 April (date to be confirmed) (30 minutes each)

Seminar Schedule and Readings:

Week 1 (5 January): Architecture, Romanticism and Interiority

  • Goethe, "On German Architecture," (1772), Goethe. The Collected Works, Essays on Art and Literature, edited by John Gearey, Princeton, 1986.
  • Raymond Williams, "Art and Society," Culture and Society, London, 1958.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

General Texts on Romanticism

  • Octavio Paz, The Children of the Mire, Cambridge, Mass., 1974, 1991.
  • Maurice Blanchot, "The Athenaeum," The Infinite Conversation (1969), Minneapolis, 1993, p. 351-359.
  • Tzvetan Todorov, "La crise romantique," Theories du symbole, Paris, 1977, p. 179-260. (English translation: Theories of the Symbol, Oxford, 1982)
  • Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, New York, 1995.

Week 2 (12 January): Pugin and the Gothic Revival: A Review of Literature

  • John Ruskin, “Romanist Modern Art,” in appendix to the The Stones of Venice, London, 1851-53.
  • Kenneth Clark, “Pugin,” in The Gothic Revival. An Essay in the History of Taste, London, 1928.
  • Phoebe B. Stanton, “Pugin: Principles of Design versus Revivalism,” JSAH, vol. 13, Oct. 1954, 20-25.
  • Raymond Williams, "Art and Society," Culture and Society, London, 1958.
  • Nikolaus Pevsner, relevant sections of The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design, London, 1968.
  • David Watkin, “Pugin,” Morality and Architecture, Oxford, 1977.
  • Chris Brooks, “Functional and Mystical: Architectural Meaning and Puginian Gothic,” and “Making the Building Speak: Symbolism and the Gothic Revival,” in Signs for the Time. Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World, London, 1984.
  • Timothy Brittain-Catlin, “A.W.N. Pugin’s English Convent Plans,” JSAH, vol. 65, no. 3, Sept. 2006, 355-377.
  • Michael Lewis, relevant section of The Gothic Revival, London, 2002.

Week 3 (19 January): Pugin: Another Reading

  • Pugin, Contrasts or a parallel…, Salisbury, 1836. (2nd Edition, revised, London, 1841
  • Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, London, 1841
  • Pugin, An apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, London, 1843
  • Rosemary Hill, “Part One, Two and Three,” in God’s Architect. Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, London, 2007, 9-162
  • Sigmund Freud, “Family Romance, (1909)” and “Mourning and Melancholia (1917).”

Week 4 (26 January)

First Student Presentation (20 minutes).

Week 5 (2 February): The Romantic Interior

(Readings TBA)

  • John Ruskin, "The Lamp of Life," The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), London.
  • John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, London, 1851-53, 3 volumes. (Consult the The Complete Works of John Ruskin, London, 1902). Read the chapter on Saint-Mark and the beginning of "The Nature of Gothic."
  • Robert Vischer, "On the optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics," (1873), Empathy, Form, and Space. Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, Santa Monica, CA., 1994, p. 89-124.

Week 6 (9 February)

Guest speaker: Diana Cheng
The Boudoir and the Eighteenth-Century Interior

(Readings TBA)

Week 7 (Wednesday, 16 February)

Guest Speaker: Professor Georges Teyssot (Laval U)
Benjamin’s Tramhaus: “Intérieurs” as Metaphors for Feelings

Readings:

  • Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris [1926], Paris, Gallimard, 1995; Id., Paris Peasant, 
London, Cape, 1971; reprint: Exact Change, 2004.
  • Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, esp. convolut K: “Dream City”, pp. 388-404; and convolut L: “Dream House”, pp. 405-415.
  • Walter Benjamin, “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century” [1935], now in: Id., The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Michael Jennings, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006, pp. 30-45 (esp. 38-40).

  • Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” [1938], now in: Id., The Writer of Modern Life, pp. 46-133 (esp. 66-96),
  • Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” [1938-1939], now in: Id., The Writer of Modern Life, pp. 134-169.
  • Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” [1939], now in: Id., The Writer of Modern Life, pp. 170-210 (esp. 202-210).
  • Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood around 1900”, final version [1938], in: Id., Selected Writings, Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, eds., vol. 3, 1935-1938, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 344-386.

Week 8 & 9 (2 and 9 March)

2nd Student Presentations (40 Minutes).

Week 10 (16 March)

Guest Speaker: Professor Nicholas Roquet (U de Mtl)
William Burges’s Interiors, or Life in Costume

(Readings TBA)

Week 11 (23 March)

Guest Speaker: Cameron Macdonell
Crypto-Gothic Architecture: Ralph Adams Cram, Architecture & Literature at the New St Mary’s Church, Walkerville, Ontario, Canada

(Readings TBA)

Week 12 & 13 (30 March and 6 April)

No meetings.

Week 14 (13 April)

Guest Speaker: Professor Annmarie Adams.

Readings:

  • Adams, A., “Sex and the Single Building: The Weston Havens House, 1941-2001,” Buildings & Landscapes, forthcoming.
  • Adams, A. "The Eichler Home: Intention and Experience in Postwar Suburbia," Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture V, edited by Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 164-78.

Week 15 (19 and 20 April)

Final Presentations (To Be Confirmed).

Elements of a General Bibliography

On Pugin

Essential Reference Works

  • Margaret Belcher, A.W.N. Pugin: An Annotated Bibliography, London, 1987.
  • Alexandra Wedgwood, The Pugin Family: Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the RIBA, Farnborough, 1977.
  • Alexandra Wedgwood, A.W.N. Pugin and the Pugin Family: Catalogue of Architectural Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1985.
  • A.W. N. Pugin, The Collected Letters, vol. 1 (1830-1842), vol. 2 (1843-1845) and vol. 3 (1846-48), ed. Margaret Belcher, Oxford, 2001, 2003, 2009.

Biographical Studies

  • A.W.N. Pugin, “Diaries” and “Autobiography,” in Alexandra Wedgwood, A.W.N. Pugin and the Pugin Family: Catalogue of Architectural Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1985.
  • Benjamin Ferrey, Recollections of A.W.N. Pugin and his Father Augustus Pugin, London, 1861.
  • John Hardman Powell, “Pugin in his Home,” ed. Alexandra Wedgwood, Architectural History, vol. 31, 1988.
  • Jane Pugin, Dearest Augustus and I: the Journal of Jane Pugin, Reading, 2004.
  • Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect. Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, London, 2007.

Secondary Literature

  • John Ruskin, “Romanist Modern Art,” in appendix to the The Stones of Venice, London, 1851-53.
  • Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, London, 1872.
  • Hermann Muthesius, Das Englishe Haus, Berlin, 1904-05.
  • Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival. An Essay in the History of Taste (1928), London, 1962
  • Michael Trappes-Lomax, Pugin: a Medieval Victorian, London, 1932.
  • Dennis Gwynn, Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin and the Catholic Revival, London, 1946.
  • Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, 2 vols., New Haven, 1954.
  • Phoebe B. Stanton, “Pugin: Principles of Design versus Revivalism,” JSAH, vol. 13, Oct. 1954, 20-25.
  • Raymond Williams, "Art and Society," Culture and Society, London, 1958.
  • J. Mordaunt Crook, “John Britton and the Genesis of the Gothic Revival,” in John Summerson, ed., Concerning Architecture. Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, London, 1968.
  • Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: the Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century Literature, London, 1971.
  • Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design, London, 1968.
  • Phoebe Stanton, Pugin, London, 1971.
  • Mark Girouard, The Victorian Country House, Oxford, 1971.
  • Georg Germann, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain. Sources, Influences and Ideas, London, 1972.
  • James Macaulay, The Gothic Revival, 1745-1845, Glasgow, 1975.
  • Malcolm Hardman, “Ruskin’s Massy Commonsense,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 16, no. 2, Spring 1976, 137-143.
  • David Watkin, Morality and Architecture, Oxford, 1977.
  • Patrick R. M. Conner, “Pugin and Ruskin,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, vol. 41, 1978, 344-350.
  • David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England, New Brunswick, 1979.
  • Michael Bright, “A Reconsideration of A.W.N. Pugin’s Architectural Theories,” in Victorian Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, Winter 1979, 151-172.
  • Jill Franklin, The Gentleman’s Country House and its Plan, 1835-1914, London, 1981.
  • Ashby Bland Crowder, “Pugin’s Contrasts: Sources for its Technique” in Architectura, vol. 13, no. 1, 1983, 57-63.
  • Chris Brooks, Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian Period, London, 1984.
  • Christina Crosby, Reading the Gothic Revival: ‘History and Hints of Household Taste’” in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender, ed., by Linda M. Shires, New York, 1992, 101-115.
  • Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright, eds., Pugin: A Gothic Passion, New Haven, 1994.
  • Alexandra Wedgwood, “Residential Architecture,” Pugin. A Gothic Passion, London, 1994, 42-61.
  • Jonathan Glancey, “Gothic Ghosts—The Grange, Ramsgate,” Perspectives on Architecture, vol. 1, no. 3, June 1994, 29-33.
  • Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright, eds., Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, New Haven, 1995.
  • Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint eds., The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society, Manchester and London, 1995.
  • David Brett, The Construction of Heritage, Cork, 1996.
  • Rosemary Hill, “Reformation to Millennium, Pugin’s Constrasts in the History of English Thought,” JSAH, vol. 58, no. 1, March 1999.
  • Michael J. Fisher, Alton Towers, a Gothic Wonderland, Stafford, 1999.
  • Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival, London, 1999
  • Vincent A. Lankewish, “Victorian Architecture of Masculine Desire,” Nineteenth-Century Studies, vol. 14, 2000, 93-119.
  • Carol A. Hrvol Flores, “Engagind the Mind’s Eye: The Use of Inscriptions in the Architecture of Owen Jones and A.W.N. Pugin,” JSAH, vol. 60, No. 2, June 2001, 158-179.
  • Michael J. Fisher, Pugin-Land: A.W.N. Pugin, Lord Shrewsbury and the Gothic Revival in Staffordshire, Stafford, 2002.
  • Michael Lewis, The Gothic Revival, London, 2002.
  • Michael Hall, Gothic Architecture and its Meanings 1550-1830,London, 2002.
  • Rosemary Hill, “From the Antiquary’s Cell to the Crystal Palace: Pugin,s Domestic Interiors,” Victorian, no. 11, November 2002, 4-9.
  • Rosemary Hill, “Pugin’s Small Houses,” Architectural History, vol. 46, 2003.
  • Rosemary Hill, “Pugin and Ruskin,” in Ruskin and Architecture, ed. Rebecca Daniels and Geoff Brandwood, Reading, 2003.
  • Rosemary Hill, “Pugin’s Churches,” Architectural History, vol. 49, 2006.
  • Timothy Brittain-Catlin, “A.W.N. Pugin’s English Convent Plans,” JSAH, vol. 65, no. 3, Sept. 2006, 355-377.
  • Christabel Powell, Augustus Welby Pugin. Designer of the British Houses of Parliament. The Victorian Quest for a Liturgical Architecture, Lewiston, NY., Queenston, Ontario, 2006.
  • Timothy Brittain-Catlin, “The Bishop’s House in Birmingham,” Studies in Victorian Architecture & Design, vol. 1, 2008, 96-105.
  • Timothy Brittain-Catlin, The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth-Century, Reading, 2009.
  • See also, as a general resource, True Principles—The Pugin Society Journal, edited by Timothy Brittain-Catlin. (Unfortunately, not yet available at the McGill Library.)

Some Literary References

  • Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 1764.
  • Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo, 1794.
  • Matthew Lewis, The Monk, 1796.
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, 1818.
  • Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth, 1821.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), Philosophy of Furniture (1840), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Domain of Arnheim or the Landscape Garden (1850), Landor's Cottage (c. 1850).
  • Charles Baudelaire, "La chambre double" Petit poème en prose, Paris, 1864.
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897.

A Few Titles on Gothic Literature

  • Maria Beville, Gothic-postmodernism. Voicing the Terror of Postmodernity, New York, 2009.
  • Fred Botting ed., The Gothic, Cambridge, 2001 (Collection of essays.)
  • Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis. The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, Montreal, Kingston, London, Ithaca, 2001.
  • Eugenia Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, New York, 1990.
  • Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott, Dickens, Cambridge, 1992.
  • Kate Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, Urbana, 1989.
  • David Punter, The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 1, The Gothic Tradition, London, New York, 1996 (2nd Edition).
  • David Punter, ed., A Companion to the Gothic, Oxford, 2000. (Collection of essays.)
  • David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law, London, 1998.
  • Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature, Edinburgh, 2007.

General Bibliography

  • Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Chicago and London, 1994.
  • Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, Minneapolis, 1986.
  • M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, New York, 1977.
  • Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, A History of Private Life, vol. 4, Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
  • Jeremy Aynsley, Charlotte Grant, Ed., Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance, London, 2006.
  • Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston, 1994.
  • Marc Baer, Theater and Disorder in Late Georgian London, New York, Oxford, 1992.
  • Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, New York, 1995.
  • Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., The Cultures of Collecting, Cambridge, Mass., 1994.
  • Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
  • Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, Princeton, 1999.
  • Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750--1890, Oxford, 2002 (A good survey of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century European architecture).
  • Maurice Blanchot, "The Athenaeum," The Infinite Conversation (1969), Minneapolis, 1993, p. 351-359.
  • Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, Manchester, 1999.
  • Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
  • Mary Douglas, “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space,” Social Research, vol. 58, number 1.
  • Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [1966], London, 1996.
  • Pascal Dibie, Ethnologie de la chambre à coucher, Paris, 1987.
  • Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire; Design and Society since 1750, London, 2000.
  • Michel Foucault, “Language to Infinity,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, New York, 1995.
  • Sigmund Freud, “Family Romance” (1909), “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), “The Uncanny” (1919), “Fetishism,” (1927). See the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud available on line.
  • Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiement in Nineteenth-Century Berlin, New Haven, 2002.
  • Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior. Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, London, New York, 2004.
  • Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy. Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Society, Cambridge, 1992.
  • Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London, 1979.
  • Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885, Stanford, 1995.
  • Michael Hall, "What Do Victorian Churches Mean? Symbolism and Sacramentalism in Anglican Church Architecture, 1850-1870," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 59, no. 1, March 2000, p. 78-95.
  • J. F. C. Harrison, Early Victorian Britain, 1832-51, London, 1979.
  • Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century, Harmonsworth, 1958.
  • Julie C. Inness, Privacy, Intimacy and Isolation, Oxford, New York, 1992.
  • John Lukacs, “The Bourgeois Interior,” American Scholar, vol. 39, no. 4, 1970.
  • Didier Maleuvre, Museum memories: History, Technology, Art, Stanford, 1999.
  • Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, Berkeley, 1999.
  • Stefan Muthesius, The Poetic Home: Designing the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Interior, London, 2008.
  • Judith Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870-1914, London, 2008.
  • Anastasis Nikolopoulou, “Historical Disruptions: the Walter Scott Melodramas,” Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, Michael Hays and Anastasis Nikolopoulou, eds., New York, 1996.
  • Octavio Paz, The Children of the Mire, Cambridge, Mass., 1974, 1991.
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