This course will examine some of the great literary monsters, witches, vampires, and specters of the Romantic period and beyond. We will seek to understand how these creatures issuing from the dark recesses of the human imagination variously define and challenge what it means to be human—and the Romantic phobias, fears and repressions they come to represent-- in works by Mary Shelley, S.T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats, R.L. Stevenson, and Bram Stoker.