The Gothic genre has always been concerned with the ‘Other’, a figure who predominantly represents the transgressive, who stands out for being different to hegemonic social and political ideals. At the end of the Victorian period, the fin de siècle Gothic attached this label to the ‘foreign’ figure, most canonically evident in the vampiric Count … Continue reading “We’re Americans”: The Gothic in Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’
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Reading Group – Black Narcissus miniseries
If Himalayan Gothic, nuns and dilapidated palaces are your thing, then join the Gothic Reading Group on Wednesday 17th February, 3 - 4:30 pm to discuss the BBC miniseries version of Black Narcissus. We will be focussing on the first episode, but you are welcome to discuss the whole series (all three episodes are available … Continue reading Reading Group – Black Narcissus miniseries
CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country
The Centre for the History of the Gothic presents: A Half-day Online Symposium May 20, 2021 ***Extended deadline for proposals: April 9 2021*** 2020 was a seemingly unprecedented year. A global pandemic erupted even as the US was seized by another wave of anti-Black violence perpetrated by law enforcement and supported by terrifying groups of … Continue reading CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country
The Gothic Epidemic
Across the centuries, the social and cultural impacts of epidemics have resonated with writers. Whether concerned with the spiritual implications of these catastrophic events, as in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), issues of individual versus collective responsibility, such as in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), or questions about the limitations and … Continue reading The Gothic Epidemic
A Ghost Story For Christmas
There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories— Ghost Stories, or more shame for us—round the Christmas fire Charles Dickens, ‘A Christmas Tree’, Household Words (1850) The association between Yuletide cheer and seasonal fear emerged from the Victorian era’s appetite for … Continue reading A Ghost Story For Christmas
What is Rebecca without the Gothic?
This is a guest post by Anastasia Klimchynskaya, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again,” the narrator muses in a voiceover at the beginning of the film Rebecca (Netflix, 2020), drawing its opening line from the … Continue reading What is Rebecca without the Gothic?
Sheffield Gothic 