This course will examine two pivotal nineteenth-century Gothic novels, Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818) and Victor Hugo’s magisterial Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), as historical, cultural, and literary phenomena through a range of generic iterations over two centuries. Beginning with key Enlightenment texts, we will examine the political and social contexts of Shelley’s and Hugo’s works with regard to scientific exploration, race, monstrosity, architecture, religion, colonialism, disability, radicalism, feminism, slavery, ethics, and aesthetics. Significant time may be given to exploring the ways in which these novels have been re-imagined through other media such as theatre, cinema, and digital media.