Buried alive in metafictional research is in an interesting and disturbing place to be. I found myself lost and alone, dug nose-deep into William H. Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife, chasing footnotes between the pages only to be lured to the bottom of one where the author suddenly exclaims ‘Now I've got you alone down … Continue reading Gravitational Grotesque, or, How I Learned to Stop Being So Meta and Love the Gothic: A story of one man’s fall back into the genre.
Category: Reading Groups
Foreshadowings: Folklore, Fairy-tales and the Gothic
From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, folklore and fairy-tale has influenced the Gothic across decades and in its many forms. With its origins in oral tradition, folklore is generally considered the generational passing down of narratives bound in a particular culture’s beliefs and customs. Associations with … Continue reading Foreshadowings: Folklore, Fairy-tales and the Gothic
Foreshadowings: Bloodlust; or The Enduring Appeal of the Vampire
Vampires are arguably the chicest of all revenants. They never get old. Literally. Like the Gothic genre, vampires have endured numerous transmutations over the centuries, progressing from primitive folklore phantasm to Byronic aristocrat. Christopher Frayling’s anthology of Vampyres (1991) charts this metamorphosis and illustrates the upward social mobility of the vampire as it is adapted … Continue reading Foreshadowings: Bloodlust; or The Enduring Appeal of the Vampire
Foreshadowings: Edgar Allan Poe
At the risk of sounding cliche I'd like to posit that Edgar Allan Poe is one of those authors so crucial to Gothic studies that he can almost never be over-examined. What's more he's very distinct in that you can't help but enjoy his work, be it one special story or the whole collection. Maybe … Continue reading Foreshadowings: Edgar Allan Poe
Forshadowings: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Considering its date of origin (which in itself is hotly debated as the play was certainly performed during Christopher Marlowe’s lifetime but it was not published until sometime after his death) The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus may not initially seem like an appropriate text for the Gothic reading group given … Continue reading Forshadowings: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Foreshadowings: The Woman in Black and Reading Group Announcements
How quickly the year flies by! This week will be our last Gothic Reading Group meeting of the 2014 academic year – we’ve covered all sorts of topics from post-colonialism to comic books, Alfred Hitchcock to Sleepy Hollow! We’re going to wrap up our year with another film: The Woman in Black (2012) film starring … Continue reading Foreshadowings: The Woman in Black and Reading Group Announcements
Sheffield Gothic 