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The Shape of Water, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Swamp Thing – what is it about the terrain of swamplands that inspires us to dream up hybrid creatures that live within them? This course takes a long view of the American fearful fascination with these amphibious landscapes, from the 18th century to today. In the 19th century especially, swampy landscapes came to evoke anxious fear of revolt and rebellion among white slaveholders while as many as two thousand escaped slaves found shelter and sustenance in the swamp’s mazy topography. Who and what was lurking just beyond the swamp’s wall of vines and veil of mist? Though the swamp of the 20th and 21st centuries retains a sense of dreary, foreboding mystery, a relatively new ecological discourse on swamplands (now called “wetlands”) has emerged calling for protection of the strange and delicate balance of marsh life. The precarity of such ecosystems as the Florida Everglades comes to represent the toll two and a half centuries of environmental plunder has taken on the American landscape. At the same time, the 2016 presidential election saw the reemergence in American political rhetoric of calls to “drain the swamp” of the federal government. By turns, the swamp has represented growth and abundance, stagnation and decay, moral depravity, organic sanctuary, and has played the roles of both harbinger of devastation and safe-haven of the oppressed. At each twist, texts imagining swamplands give us a unique glimpse into the aesthetic, social, and political anxieties and struggles of the moment. This course aims to track these historical shifts and develop an understanding of precisely how and why they occur, all the while asking what it is about swamplands that attracts our deepest worries and our eeriest curiosities.