Literary critics have long insisted on a difference in imaginative potentials between Gothic novels and Romantic writings. There has been a tendency to consider the Gothic as primarily a form of prose fiction, as something subordinate to its early contemporary. One critic goes so far as to call the Gothic the bastard cousin of Romanticism. Indeed, Romantic writers, particularly the first generation writers, attempted to distance themselves from the sensationalism and immorality of Gothic works. For example, William Wordsworth condemns such “frantic novels, [and] sickly German Tragedies” in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a work that is considered by many to mark the beginning of the Romantic period of British literature. Wordsworth’s friend and colleague Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a scathing review of Matthew Lewis’s popular thriller The Monk, particularly denouncing its depraved subject matter. However, both these poets and especially second generation Romantic writers adopted and adapted themes that were central to the Gothic. In this course we will explore the influence of Gothicism on writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary and Percy Shelley.