Understanding Gothic - contextual PowerPoints and accompanying extracts for OCR Gothic option

The series of 10 brief PowerPoints and accompanying extracts, are designed to meet the requirements of Component 2 of the OCR A-level: Comparative and Contextual Study – specifically the Gothic option. There were three key objectives:

• To give students some broader understanding of the idea of the Gothic;
• To introduce them to other key Gothic texts.
• Finally, the extracts that link to each of the PowerPoints enabled them to practise the unseen text element of this paper, but with a specific AO3 element. In other words, the ideas they had thought about in the PowerPoint would be exemplified by the extract, so the presentation on Byronic heroes is linked to an extract from Jane Eyre where Rochester is introduced.

The PowerPoints are by no means exhaustive. I used them as part of a weekly session exploring a different aspect of Gothic -15/20 minutes on the presentation, the remainder of the lesson was spent looking at the extract.

The topics/themes covered are:

• Byronic heroes (extract = Jane Eyre)
• Gothic and boundaries (extract = Frankenstein)
• Radcliffe, Female gothic and terror/horror (extract = The Italian)
• Southern Gothic (extract = A Good Man is Hard to find)
• Gothic and religion (extract = The Monk)
• Dracula and Victorian England (extract = Dracula extract 2)
• Sexuality and Gothic (extract = Dracula)
• Gothic and supernatural (extract = Woman in Black)
• Gothic and madness (extract = Yellow Wallpaper)
• Dorian Gray and opium dens (extract = Picture of Dorian Gray)