Since students were required to read Groom’s introduction for the course, and since Groom’s reading directly contradicts many of the now-accepted queer readings of Otranto, I made it a point to bring up his disdain for Haggerty’s argument during class discussion. In the introduction, Groom characterizes the queer readings of the novel as absurd, and he emphasizes that the accusations of Walpole’s own homosexuality (which are discussed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and George Haggerty among other scholars) are “unfounded.” Groom emphasizes that “homosexual desire is entirely absent from the novel,” and he proposes instead that Manfred’s perverse, quasi-incestuous desires represent anxiety about an older man’s desire for a younger woman. We used the Oxford World’s Classics edition that includes an introduction by editor Nick Groom, who touches on some of the queer readings that have been done of the novel only to adamantly refute them. In our case, that literary motif is the Gothic, and we began the semester with Horace Walpole’s seminal Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). This semester I am teaching a course on “Gender and Literature.” The goals of the course are to introduce students to feminist, queer, and gender studies approaches to literary analysis while focusing on a specific time period, motif, or movement in literature.
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