Earlier this week, I read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto for the first time. Published in 1764, it’s widely considered the first gothic novel, the cornerstone of a genre that would include future works like those of the Brontë sisters, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and eventually all of modern horror. I love ghost stories and Southern gothic literature, and I really love October, so at the beginning of the month I sat down with a few undergraduate syllabi and wrote up a reading list for myself that would trace the gothic genre from its origins in the Romantic period, across the Atlantic and into the American South, and up to the present day.
This is the kind of freelance Try Hard energy that is unfortunately woven into the core of my identity; it is who I am and why I am that way. But over the last year, I’ve noticed a lot of online content featuring people—usually young women—outlining their own “personal syllabi,” which, like mine, are self-created and self-guided courses of study on narrow topics with varying degrees of rigor.
