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 ENGL273, Literature and the Fantastic, offers an opportunity to explore an array of short fiction from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries concerned with the fantastic, the supernatural, and the uncanny. The course is designed around six clusters of short stories yoked by literary genre or by theme: the world of faerie; marvellous creatures; ghosts and other hauntings; perilous realms; the super(natural); and speculative fiction.  Assigned readings represent the work of diverse authors including Mary Shelley, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, Edith Nesbit, Angela Carter, Thomas King, Margaret Atwood, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Van Camp, Judith Merril, and Eden Robinson.

While grounded in the practice of close reading, the course is also designed to gradually flesh out a historical background that will extend and enrich the analysis of individual texts. Although the course eschews a strictly chronological history of literature and the fantastic, written course notes contextualize assigned readings within the historical and socio-cultural contexts in which they were produced.  Among our tasks throughout the course will be to consider what the subject stories say or suggest about critical issues such as race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, age, ability, identity, the body, the environment, and other issues germane to writers and readers past and present; and to be mindful of ways that literature engages, responds to, challenges, or contributes to discourses or socio-cultural “conversations” percolating or circulating in the ostensibly real world.

Discussion forum activities and other written assignments are designed to encourage reflection and consideration of such issues as the function of fantasy or of the fantastic in literature and in other socio-cultural contexts; and of the features or characteristics, if any, that unite (or distinguish) literary genres concerned with the fantastic.