This course will look at Video Games and Victorian literature with a special focus on the Gothic. The course will be divided according to the many subgenres of Gothic literature that took form across the period, including the rise of the Imperial Gothic, late-Victorian Slum Fiction, the rise of the Detective Novel, and Sensational Murder Mysteries. Each of our course units will conclude with a discussion of the Gothic genre’s legacy in modern video games, focusing both on the (re)interpretation of Victorian Gothic tropes and techniques across mediums, and focusing on how literature and gameplay allow us to do different things with these horror stories. We will finish the course with a special unit on literary texts that are inspired by neo-Victorian video game precursors: this final unit might, for example, include a study of the Castlevania Series, which is based on the Japanese video game Konami and which features Dracula and Carmilla as primary characters.
