Revising the gothic unit

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, given that I'm giving a class on it tomorrow, and it is interesting to consider what is essential. One thing is the nature of the genre itself--the examiner's interpretation of it is so different from the ways in which we might normally think of the gothic (assuming you thought much about it beofre you had to study it for this paper!) that it forces you to focus on the connections that they must have made to create the exam.... which again makes you think about useful connections for revision.

They admit in the spec. that it is something of a fluid definition, and that is part of the charm of studying it in this way, I think--that you start to imagine what else could be included. For instance, when I was at school, back in the dawn of time, we would never have studied Wuthering Heights as a Gothic text, because the Gothic was seen by my teachers to be a little trashy in some ways (certainly we wouldn't have done Frankenstein for GCSE, for instance, that would have been very lowbrow) and to think of a text as a 'gothic novel' would be to diminish its importance as a serious novel. You can see this view reflected in Austen's take-off of it in Northanger Abbey, which shows you how long ago I was at school (about 1789), but it lasted for quite a long time. Now, of course, we look at the Brontes and there are plenty of gothic features, and it seems strange to think that such a novel wasn't always in that genre...