- 9:00am – 9:10am
Opening Remarks - 9:10am – 10:30am
Panel One A – Institutions
Panel One B – Consuming Genres - 10:30am – 10:40am
Break - 10:40am – 12:00pm
Panel Two A – Monstrous Cravings
Panel Two B – Vampires, Feeding and Femininity - 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Lunch
- 1:00pm – 2:20pm
Panel Three A – Consumable Publications
Panel Three B – Illness - 2:20pm – 2:30pm
Break - 2.30pm – 3:50pm
Panel Four A – Eco-Gothic Networks
Panel Four B – Monstrous Girlhood - 3:50pm – 4:00pm
Break - 4:00pm – 5:20pm
Panel Five A – Food and Feasting
Panel Five B – Imperialisms I
(Please note all times are GMT)
Panel 1A: Institutions
- Anactoria Clarke: Consuming Knowledge, Consuming Secrets: Classics and Gothic in Dark Academia
- Examining the role of classics as a discipline in two dark academia texts, and how the consumption of both knowledge and secrets contributes to the gothic atmosphere of both. In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the study of classics is elitist, limited to a selective – and selected – group of students, encouraged to think and act outside of the usual student boundaries, and this consumption of specialist, esoteric (for the university) knowledge results in secrets, lies, and murder. Throughout the novel, the gothic atmosphere is built by the protagonist’s narration, as well as the reader’s knowledge of what has happened; the denouement of the novel is disclosing how and why. In Mark Prins’s The Latinist, it is academic competition that leads to secretive behaviour and betrayal, with the female protagonist eventually exploiting her knowledge and discoveries at the expense of an academic supervisor.
Exploring how the setting of the university, a staple of the dark academia genre, serves to establish the gothic atmosphere, and how it is shown to produce characters who become monsters. The pursuit of both academia in itself, and classics as a discipline, suggests esoteric and selective knowledge, and entices the protagonists to harbour secrets. The novels give their protagonists very different outcomes, and the parallels and contrasts between how both novels explore the consumption of knowledge will form the conclusion of this paper.
- Examining the role of classics as a discipline in two dark academia texts, and how the consumption of both knowledge and secrets contributes to the gothic atmosphere of both. In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the study of classics is elitist, limited to a selective – and selected – group of students, encouraged to think and act outside of the usual student boundaries, and this consumption of specialist, esoteric (for the university) knowledge results in secrets, lies, and murder. Throughout the novel, the gothic atmosphere is built by the protagonist’s narration, as well as the reader’s knowledge of what has happened; the denouement of the novel is disclosing how and why. In Mark Prins’s The Latinist, it is academic competition that leads to secretive behaviour and betrayal, with the female protagonist eventually exploiting her knowledge and discoveries at the expense of an academic supervisor.
- Amy Sturgis: Consumed by the Campus: Dark Academia, the Gothic Imagination, and the Missing Student
- She went for a walk in between classes and was never seen again. Many anxieties — academic, social, financial — may surround the student experience, but one that lingers in the corners of our collective imagination, fueled by real-world examples, is that of the consuming campus: the school that metaphorically swallows the student whole and leaves no evidence behind. The Dark Academia tradition of Gothic storytelling, focused on an academic setting and interrogating systemic imbalances and abuses of power, has grappled with unsolved campus vanishings for generations. For instance, echoes of the 1946 disappearance of student Paula Jean Welden from Bennington College may be found in foundational works in the genre, including Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951) and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992).
In the last decade, two separate Dark Academia novels, The Button Field (2014) and Killingly (2023), have employed a Gothic lens to bring into focus the 1897 disappearance of student Bertha Mellish from Mount Holyoke College. Authors Gail Husch and Katharine Beutner ask similar questions about what happened to Bertha Mellish, and they craft intriguingly different narratives as answers. Why does the vanished student haunt us? What can investigating the circumstances and systems that contributed to the disappearance teach us? How may Dark Academia authors draw timely, applicable lessons from historical cold cases about consuming campuses? To answer these questions, this presentation will examine The Button Field and Killingly in conversation with each other and in the context of both recent scholarship on Dark Academia and the Gothic in general and Bridget M. Marshall’s work on the Industrial Gothic in particular (due to its relevance to the Bertha Mellish case). Together, this presentation will argue, these novels illustrate how Dark Academia works grapple with disturbing questions, offer timely and actionable critique, and honor the memory of the missing.
- She went for a walk in between classes and was never seen again. Many anxieties — academic, social, financial — may surround the student experience, but one that lingers in the corners of our collective imagination, fueled by real-world examples, is that of the consuming campus: the school that metaphorically swallows the student whole and leaves no evidence behind. The Dark Academia tradition of Gothic storytelling, focused on an academic setting and interrogating systemic imbalances and abuses of power, has grappled with unsolved campus vanishings for generations. For instance, echoes of the 1946 disappearance of student Paula Jean Welden from Bennington College may be found in foundational works in the genre, including Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951) and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992).
- İpek Kotan Yiğit: “We all have a hunger”: Anti-Catholicism and deprivation in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
- Charlotte Brontë’s semi-autobiographical novel Villette (1853), since its publication to the present day, has attracted critical attention for its anti-Catholic elements. With that said, certain formal aspects of the narrative’s anti-Catholicism tend to be overlooked; and one such aspect, I argue, is the connection between the theme of anti-Catholicism and the precarity of middle-class identity. This connection between anti-Catholicism and middle-class identity is developed mainly through the narrative’s engagement with two distinct yet interrelated themes or tropes: its employment of Gothic conventions, and the theme of deprivation and hunger. The narrator and protagonist Lucy Snowe leaves England and her unfulfilling life there to seek employment in the fictional Catholic country of Labassecour on the Continent. However, her English conceptions of class and religion follow her there, even though they prevented her happiness in the past. The two main intersection points of class and religion discussed in this presentation are the class implications of the ghost nun plot, and how Brontë has transformed hunger and deprivation into evocative metaphors for the religious and class-related problems of Lucy Snowe.
Deprivation, which I focus in particular in my presentation, is a theme through which anti-Catholic sentiment finds particular expression in Villette. It is both material and spiritual, as Lucy’s loneliness and suffering is largely caused by her lack of material comfort and security. While this sense of constant personal deprivation is clearly conveyed in Lucy’s narrative, at the same time there is, within the novel’s anti-Catholic framework, an association of noble, martyr-like deprivation with Protestantism and corrupt, worldly abundance with Catholicism. Consequently, I argue that Lucy’s problematic relation with food and eating, as well as the vocabulary of food, hunger, and fullness functions as a kind of coded language in the narrative in which these ambivalent and conflicting (because ideological) feelings find expression.
- Charlotte Brontë’s semi-autobiographical novel Villette (1853), since its publication to the present day, has attracted critical attention for its anti-Catholic elements. With that said, certain formal aspects of the narrative’s anti-Catholicism tend to be overlooked; and one such aspect, I argue, is the connection between the theme of anti-Catholicism and the precarity of middle-class identity. This connection between anti-Catholicism and middle-class identity is developed mainly through the narrative’s engagement with two distinct yet interrelated themes or tropes: its employment of Gothic conventions, and the theme of deprivation and hunger. The narrator and protagonist Lucy Snowe leaves England and her unfulfilling life there to seek employment in the fictional Catholic country of Labassecour on the Continent. However, her English conceptions of class and religion follow her there, even though they prevented her happiness in the past. The two main intersection points of class and religion discussed in this presentation are the class implications of the ghost nun plot, and how Brontë has transformed hunger and deprivation into evocative metaphors for the religious and class-related problems of Lucy Snowe.
Panel 1B – Consuming Genres
- Erika Kvistad: Happily Ever After: Consuming the Gothic in Contemporary Dark Romance
- Writing about the Coppola adaptation of Dracula, Fred Botting argues that “[r]omance, as it frames gothic, seems to clean up its darker counterpart, sanitising its depravations; it tries to transform, even ennoble, violent gothic energies as a quest for love in the face of death; it recuperates gothic excesses in the name of the heterosexual couple”. While the Gothic and romance genres are, of course, historically deeply entwined, critical readings of the relationship between these genres often frame romance almost as a threat to “its darker counterpart”; the romance elements defang or consume the excesses and complexities of the Gothic. In studies of contemporary Gothic romance, these readings have often centred on the Twilight series in particular as an enactment of (in Joseph Crawford’s words) the “triumph of romance over Gothic…of social integration over alienation, coherency over disintegration, heterosexual love over unconventional or deviant desires”.
In this context, this paper explores two recent works of what is now usually called dark romance fiction, a subgenre of contemporary popular romance that includes Gothic elements like fear, violence, transgression, buried secrets from the past, power inequalities, and the threat or reality of sexual assault. Reading Amelia Wilde’s Beast of Bishop’s Landing series (2021) and Sam Mariano’s Descent (2021), both instances of romance captivity narratives, I want to examine what romance does to the Gothic, and what the Gothic does to romance, in these texts. I will suggest that just as the romance in these texts is structured and enabled by the Gothic elements of the narrative, the Gothic elements of the narrative are given power by the romance elements: in particular, the genre feature that perhaps most strongly distinguishes the romance, the HEA or “happily ever after”, can come to function as an intensely Gothic feature in itself, a threat as much as a promise. In these texts the two genres bite each others’ tails, consuming and feeding each other.
- Writing about the Coppola adaptation of Dracula, Fred Botting argues that “[r]omance, as it frames gothic, seems to clean up its darker counterpart, sanitising its depravations; it tries to transform, even ennoble, violent gothic energies as a quest for love in the face of death; it recuperates gothic excesses in the name of the heterosexual couple”. While the Gothic and romance genres are, of course, historically deeply entwined, critical readings of the relationship between these genres often frame romance almost as a threat to “its darker counterpart”; the romance elements defang or consume the excesses and complexities of the Gothic. In studies of contemporary Gothic romance, these readings have often centred on the Twilight series in particular as an enactment of (in Joseph Crawford’s words) the “triumph of romance over Gothic…of social integration over alienation, coherency over disintegration, heterosexual love over unconventional or deviant desires”.
- Amal Saad: Transformative Gothic Subversion in Chainani’s The School for Good and Evil
- Soman Chainani’s The School for Good and Evil is a children’s book series in which fairytales serve as a foundation for both plot and world-building. While it would more aptly be described as a fairytale borrowing than a retelling, the fact of the matter remains that both descriptions bring along with them elements of the Gothic. In their most original forms, fairytales, in and of themselves, are a representation of the Gothic, with similar conventions of damsels in distress, the supernatural, and an almost romanticised depiction of terror. Thus, it is almost natural to expect that a narrative based almost in its entirety in fairytales would inherently intertwine with Gothic tradition. What makes The School for Good and Evil particularly intriguing, however, is the fact that despite its subversion of typical Gothic novel conventions — for example, the helpless heroine is replaced with two heroines who are self-sufficient within their conjoined existence — the series manages to maintain a semblance of the Gothic. In an attempt to create the dreaded “relatability” that 21st-century audiences tend to seek, this subversion appears to aim for a series that is more easily “consumed” — so to speak — by its middle-school readers. In trying to make his characters more “real” and “human”, Chainani strives to bring rationale into a piece of work that is almost intrinsically irrational, and, in doing so, he creates that are almost too human. This paper aims to explore how The School for Good and Evil, eager to be consumed, shies away from the Gothic in a manner that makes it unerringly so: uncanny, grotesque, and just a little bit off-putting.
Panel 2A – Monstrous Cravings
- Laura Eastlake: ‘I could not wish for a sweeter death’: Sugar, Craving, and the Late-Victorian Vampire
- By the final decades of the nineteenth century, sugar had become dissolved into cultural as well as literal bloodstreams in Britain. Sugar production had risen from 572,000 tons in 1830 to 6.1M tons by 1890 and the average person’s intake had increased sixfold. This paper explores how sugar and sweetness functioned in the late-Victorian Gothic imagination and particularly in relation to the figure of the vampire. From Dracula’s longing for ‘sweet, sweet Madam Mina’ to Harriet Brandt’s unsettling parallel cravings for sweets and the affections of ‘sweet little white’ children in Blood of the Vampire (1897), sugar has been an understudied signifier in the semantics of vampirism. Though the vampire has been widely theorised as an embodiment of addiction and sexual appetites, sugar offers us a new lens for reinterpreting the cultural meanings and popular appeal of the vampire.
I suggest that in some ways, a sugar-based reading makes the vampire a more relatable and less ‘othered’ creature, whose cravings would be widely understood by a sweet-eating readership. At the same time, however, the language of sugar places the vampire in a tradition of discourse on race, commerce, and power dating back to abolitionist boycotts of slave-produced sugar, where tea sweetened with sugar was decried as ‘the blood-sweetened beverage’ (Robert Southey) and consuming it equated with ‘drinking the blood of iniquity’ (William Fox).
Sugar offers us a way of understanding readers’ thirst for vampire stories, as well as the unsettling appeal of the vampire as a creature of abject consumption.
- By the final decades of the nineteenth century, sugar had become dissolved into cultural as well as literal bloodstreams in Britain. Sugar production had risen from 572,000 tons in 1830 to 6.1M tons by 1890 and the average person’s intake had increased sixfold. This paper explores how sugar and sweetness functioned in the late-Victorian Gothic imagination and particularly in relation to the figure of the vampire. From Dracula’s longing for ‘sweet, sweet Madam Mina’ to Harriet Brandt’s unsettling parallel cravings for sweets and the affections of ‘sweet little white’ children in Blood of the Vampire (1897), sugar has been an understudied signifier in the semantics of vampirism. Though the vampire has been widely theorised as an embodiment of addiction and sexual appetites, sugar offers us a new lens for reinterpreting the cultural meanings and popular appeal of the vampire.
- Evan Hayles Gledhill: Cannibalism, Queerness and Agency: taking the Gothic within ourselves
- There are endless documentaries, docudramas, and traditional drama series focused on the serial killer – from the ‘quality television’ outputs like Mindhunter (2017-2019) and Hannibal (2013-2015) and Des (2020), to the popular procedurals of Criminal Minds (2005–2016) and Dexter (2006-2013) re-booted in recent years, and the constant churn of variable quality documentaries from Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer (2019-2022) to World’s Most Evil Killers (2017 -). Yet the cannibalistic killer is a rarity, statistically speaking, receiving outsize attention in the entertainment media. This paper focuses on fictional texts like the television series Hannibal and the novels and short stories of Poppy Z Brite, putting them into dialogue with recent media re-engagements with real murders like Jeffrey Dahmer.
To consume the body of another is often framed in these tales and retellings as acts of becoming, in which the body which is consumed enables a transformation in the mental and emotional life of their killer. But why do they become, and why is personal transformation such a key theme? In the supernatural framings of consumption, from the vampire to the wendigo, the act transforms the consumer into a physical monster. Yet, moral monstrosity is one of the least raised issues in the fictional texts – morality, as a social or universal consideration, is secondary to the personal experience. I therefore posit agency as the defining lens through which this act is theorised and experienced. This framing, engaging with key ideologies of consent, disgust, and desire, is why these stories are so often concerned with ideas of queerness. The desire to consume the body of another is a queer desire, to put the wrong body part into the wrong orifice, on the most basic level. Can the desire to transform the self, to exert one’s agency, occur without the input (pun intended) of others? Is insistence upon agency and self-transformation always going to be queer/monstrous within a hegemonic society?
- There are endless documentaries, docudramas, and traditional drama series focused on the serial killer – from the ‘quality television’ outputs like Mindhunter (2017-2019) and Hannibal (2013-2015) and Des (2020), to the popular procedurals of Criminal Minds (2005–2016) and Dexter (2006-2013) re-booted in recent years, and the constant churn of variable quality documentaries from Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer (2019-2022) to World’s Most Evil Killers (2017 -). Yet the cannibalistic killer is a rarity, statistically speaking, receiving outsize attention in the entertainment media. This paper focuses on fictional texts like the television series Hannibal and the novels and short stories of Poppy Z Brite, putting them into dialogue with recent media re-engagements with real murders like Jeffrey Dahmer.
Panel 2B – Vampires, Feeding and Femininity
- Laura Davidel: “The tasty red blood that would fill my mouth and make me feel human for one instant”
- Late twentieth and early twenty-first-century renditions of the humanized vampire rework the theme of the compulsion to consume blood through vampires’ self-control and self-imposed dietary restrictions. As such, the rise of the vegetarian vampire who refrains from human blood consumption is most obvious in the guise of Anne Rice’s Louis, Stephenie Meyers’ the Cullens, Mitchell in Being Human, Stephen Salvatore in Vampire Diaries, and Bill Compton in True Blood, among others. Nevertheless, if most of these vegetarian vampires are male-identified, vampire women appear to have a more complicated relationship to feeding on human blood and do not adhere to dietary restrictions.
This presentation will focus on Anne Rice’s Pandora, Alexis Henderson’s House of Hunger, and Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating to discuss how Pandora, Countess Lisavet Bathory, and Lydia, each cope with their hunger for blood and intimacy. Drawing on Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s ideas regarding consumption and food as “entwined with frameworks of desire, that in turn affect our understanding of constraint, excess, and depravation,” I will examine how each of these vampires engages in a gothic mode of consumption. For Pandora, the moment of feeding from her human victim places her on a liminal continuum between her monstrosity and her feeling human, despite her “unclean desire” (Rice). Countess Lisavet Bathory creates a household of bloodmaids who are bound by a contract to offer their blood to be incorporated in the Contess’ tea. Lisavet’s so-called “medical regime” (Henderson, 53) requires her to consume large quantities of blood from her bloodmaids whom she repays in lavish cakes and luxurious life at her house. Kohda’s teenage vampire, Lydia, experiences self-induced starvation while being simultaneously obsessed with humans’ ability to eat different types of food and to have social experiences around food. These incarnations of the vampire woman portray the hunger that cannot be controlled by dietary restrictions nor by moral and ethical imperatives. Not surprisingly, these vampire women are most alive when they are feeding, absorbing human culture along with blood.
- Late twentieth and early twenty-first-century renditions of the humanized vampire rework the theme of the compulsion to consume blood through vampires’ self-control and self-imposed dietary restrictions. As such, the rise of the vegetarian vampire who refrains from human blood consumption is most obvious in the guise of Anne Rice’s Louis, Stephenie Meyers’ the Cullens, Mitchell in Being Human, Stephen Salvatore in Vampire Diaries, and Bill Compton in True Blood, among others. Nevertheless, if most of these vegetarian vampires are male-identified, vampire women appear to have a more complicated relationship to feeding on human blood and do not adhere to dietary restrictions.
- Kelsey Shawgo: Legacy of the Teenage Lesbian Vampire: Netflix’s First Kill and its Literary Predecessors
- Amongst renewed interest in reclaiming the lesbian vampire, including Le Fanu’s classic Carmilla with Carmen Maria Machado’s 2019 edition, Netflix’s First Kill (2022) explores 21st-century adolescent queerness through the metaphor of vampirism. This paper will explore the ways First Kill adopts, builds on, and rejects earlier ideas present in Carmilla (1872) and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) about Victorian concepts of adolescence, Gothic excess, vampiric and romantic consumption, and maturity. I employ Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of sideways growth to argue that in the case of queer vampires, vampiric immortality functions as a metaphor for queer sideways growth, a theory that claims that young queer people who cannot identify with heteronormative benchmarks like marriage and having children, sometimes get caught in an all-consuming, non-reproductive cycle of pleasure-seeking that keeps them from emotionally maturing. I argue that Victorian queer female teenage vampires like Carmilla and Harriet Brandt functioned as cautionary tales about consumptive, immature girlhood love. In these examples, vampiric feeding (whether it be blood consumption or, in Harriet’s case, psychic energy consumption), can be read as a metaphor for all-consuming teenage love, while vampiric immortality can be read as the result of sideways growth. I will argue that First Kill complicates these tropes and metaphors for 21st-century viewers. First Kill attempts to rewrite the script and paint queer teenage girls in a more positive light by reclaiming the teenage lesbian vampire and romanticizing rather than demonizing the emotionality of teenage girlhood, though its premature cancellation doesn’t fully allow for this resolution.
- Adrienne Andrus: vampires, food, embodiment
- The covid-19 pandemic exacerbated fears about the challenges of regulating the body, as many worried that lockdowns and disruptions of externally imposed schedules for work and eating would lead to more frequent “bingeing” on both food and cultural content that we are meant to consume only moderately to maintain the appearance of health and productivity demanded by neoliberalism. These two areas of regulation are not only similar but deeply interconnected, as conscientious or careless consumption of food and media are frequently assumed to go hand in hand. I suggest that the conflation of the moral and the aesthetic implicit in the language of “guilt” common in contemporary diet culture is exaggerated by the vampire’s binge. I root this discussion in Jim Jarmusch’s 2012 film Only Lovers Left Alive, pointing to the ways in which disgust and contempt for Ava’s (Mia Wasakowska) fatal losses of control over her vampiric urges merge with and are tied to her habits of media consumption. The vampire characters in this film who limit themselves to small portions of bagged blood are also the ones who appreciate high art and culture, whereas Ava lacks restraint in both her blood-feeding and her preference for funny videos on YouTube. This paper draws on existing literature that reads vampire texts as reflective of a culture’s anxieties about food and embodiment, including Anna Krugovoy-Silver’s “Vampirism and the Anorexic Paradigm,” J.e.d. Stavick’s “Love at First Beet” and Laura Wright’s “Post-Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ ‘Twilight,’ and ‘True Blood’”.
Panel 3A – Consumable Publications
- Rose McKean: “Objects of Terror”: Replication and Consumerism in Romantic-Period Gothic Chapbooks
- Cheaply produced and widely distributed, Gothic chapbooks became an increasingly popular way to consume Gothic narratives towards the end of the eighteenth century. Whether as works of original fiction, or adaptations of popular novels or plays, chapbooks condensed labyrinthine Gothic plots into short, affordable and digestible narratives, ranging between thirty-six and seventy-two pages in length. Stocked in booksellers, stationers and circulating libraries alongside successful novels, many of which provided the material for the chapbook’s adaptations, this popular form granted an expanding audience of the middle, working and labouring classes unprecedented access to the Gothic. The chapbook itself was a voracious form, rampantly borrowing from a wide variety of Gothic sources and refashioning these elements into hybrid, often hyperbolic and deeply self-conscious narratives, richly saturated with a series of familiar Gothic conventions. Designed specifically to satisfy the desires of Gothic fiction readers, these chapbooks inevitably raised anxieties surrounding the uninhibited consumption of the Gothic. Until a recent revival in critical interest, they have remained at the margins of studies of the Gothic, often being dismissed as a ‘derivative’ form. I intend to destabilise these notions by recentring Gothic replication and consumerism as key elements not only of the chapbook’s success, but revelatory of its affective tactics. My paper focuses on two often-overlooked women who approached the chapbook trade from different perspectives: pioneering publisher Anne Lemoine and prolific author Sarah Wilkinson. Both women engaged in the chapbook trade to financially support themselves. The diverse and experimental body of work they produced may be used to challenge our understanding of the relationship between consumer society, artistic production, and gender.
- Dilanaz Güler: Violet Fane’s “On the Marmora” and the Gothic as Consumable Politics
- The Lady’s Realm ran from 1896 until 1914 as a women’s magazine designed to appeal to an upper-middle class audience. Echoing Oscar Wilde’s marketing strategies during his editorship of The Woman’s World, the periodical promoted conservative “New Woman” ideals that were preoccupied with material consumption, especially by means of décor, makeup, and dress. Observing the first issue of the Lady’s Realm from a lens informed by the magazine’s emphasis on a depoliticized New Woman figure, a piece by the literary celebrity H.E. Lady Currie (Violet Fane) strikes the reader as a work seemingly discordant with this ideal. Fane’s poem “On the Marmora” is a specimen of the fin de siècle Gothic: the piece depicts a dead body with his neck slashed and eyes open as a group row past it. Besides its depictions of death and allusions to automatism, the poem’s engagement with the Victorian anxieties around the state of the Empire align “On the Marmora” with the Gothic works of the 1890s. In this paper, I read this paradox between the grotesque poem and its tamer, conservative medium as an occurrence of the uncanny, and explore what it means for a Gothic poem like “On the Marmora” to be published in a periodical made for easy consumption. I then explore how, for Fane, periodical culture and the Gothic’s close relationship with consumption allow for a female literary celebrity to dilute the political undertones of “On the Marmora”, making it accordingly “digestible” for The Lady’s Realm. More broadly, I work to emphasise Fane’s critically overlooked locus in the fin de siècle Gothic tradition, and to observe her not just as a source of inspiration for Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, but as a Gothic writer in her own right.
- Beth Brigham: ‘Eat the Rich’: Misconsumption in the Penny Bloods of James Malcolm Rymer
- ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’.
Though it is likely that the above phrase was wrongly attributed to Jean Jacques Rousseau, its resurgence has galvanised today’s anti-capitalist movements and thus endures as a powerful product of misconsumption. Yet, the social implications of the ‘eat the rich’ maxim were previously articulated in the nineteenth century just as a proliferation of literature began to associate working-class social aspirations with the supposedly indiscriminate and generally haphazard misconsumption of newly accessible forms of information and knowledge. For the British upper classes, the growing taste for what was perceived as the cheap and lowly gothic sensationalism of the penny blood only served to illustrate the failure of the working-class ‘March of Intellect’. In turn, scholars such as Louis James have suggested that James Malcolm Rymer, thwarted in his aspirations to become a middle-class writer, had an ambivalent relationship with popular fiction and that his depictions of the heedless lower-class crowds in his penny bloods suggest the writer viewed his readership as ‘fickle and unintelligent’. Following a recent wave of scholarship that has re-evaluated the social and cultural value of the penny blood, this paper suggests that Rymer’s penny serials in fact provided a counter-discourse to the ‘March of Intellect’ literature. Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood (1845-1847) and The String of Pearls (1846-1847), better known as Sweeney Todd, together offer gothic anti-heroes that uncannily embody the ‘eat the rich’ maxim, drawing attention to the condition of the working class through narratives of actual human consumption. I suggest that Rymer thus constructed misconsumption as a form of social resistance and that, rather than deriding his readership, the writer instead demanded that his readers continued to question the narratives that they were fed.
- ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’.
Panel 3B – Illness
- Natalie Hurt: Questioning feminism and madness in the ‘Abodes of Horror’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and Joanna Baillie’s Orra
- I will consider the madness experienced by the two female protagonists in the texts, and question if that madness can assist a feminist reading. In Maria and Orra, madness seems inflicted upon the women, and constructed by the space around them. As Michel Foucault contends in his Madness and Civilisation ‘madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man’ (Foucault, p. 24) and whatever truth he deems necessary. I will further explore Foucault’s ideas around madness as a construction.
I will argue that the madness constructed is a form of protection for women, as it allows them to escape the expectations and restrictions of their gender This may seem a radical proposal, but looking closely at the madness in Orra and Maria, it can be discerned that the madness experienced and constructed by and for the protagonists can be understood as a mode of liberation, which allows for a feminist reading. Both women are subjected to madness, and though that madness comes in different forms, they are both permitted to elude marriage in the process.
I will also examine and acknowledge that naming the madness in the texts as potentially feminist is not without its complications as it could run the risk of confirming that uncontrollable and unruly women (as Maria and Orra are believed to be) are doomed to fulfil the stereotype of the hysterical and deranged woman, as it is their only mode of escape. However, viewing the madness as a door to autonomy places a whole new feminist facet onto something that had previously been viewed as damning and punitive.
- I will consider the madness experienced by the two female protagonists in the texts, and question if that madness can assist a feminist reading. In Maria and Orra, madness seems inflicted upon the women, and constructed by the space around them. As Michel Foucault contends in his Madness and Civilisation ‘madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man’ (Foucault, p. 24) and whatever truth he deems necessary. I will further explore Foucault’s ideas around madness as a construction.
- Kim D’Souza: Carving away at her: exploring consumption and fetishism of female illness
- A young sculptor finds himself without his muse – a melancholic skeletal model of a woman with whom he was infatuated; morbidly inspired by the beautiful delicate suffering of her body, the bones that clawed out under her ashen skin. But the tragedy finally enveloped her, so she lays beneath the dampened earth, rope marks etched into her skin as a final act of control. He observed the ripening of mental disease that carved away at her flesh, reflected in his steady hands chipping at thinning ivory.
Following her death, he is mourning the absence of his artistry, submerging himself in liquor bottles. Desperate for an end to this misery, he seeks to unearth the buried source of his creativity, to find passion in soullessness. Under the cast of night, with none but the moon as a witness, he visits the land of the lifeless.
A story of consumption and its lack – of the tragic muse consumed by her illness as she denies herself nourishment, of the artist consuming the image of her while his mind is overcome with morbid desires. A story about society’s monstrous fetishisation of female suffering, portrayed through the venomous romance of the sculptor and landscaped by a traditional gothic setting.
- A young sculptor finds himself without his muse – a melancholic skeletal model of a woman with whom he was infatuated; morbidly inspired by the beautiful delicate suffering of her body, the bones that clawed out under her ashen skin. But the tragedy finally enveloped her, so she lays beneath the dampened earth, rope marks etched into her skin as a final act of control. He observed the ripening of mental disease that carved away at her flesh, reflected in his steady hands chipping at thinning ivory.
- Morrison Brown: The Thing That Ate The Village: Tracing the Consumptive Spectre of AIDS in Horror from The Hunger to Antiviral
- The HIV/AIDS Crisis of the 80s accelerated so rapidly and with such intensity through multiple marginalized communities that it is easy to imagine the disease as some terrible and hungry force consuming entire communities just as it consumed the bodies of those infected.
Yet the cultural construction of AIDS and the horror genre intersect along other lines than yhis metaphor. The AIDS crisis gave birth to queer kinds of spectrality, haunting semi-absences, and hypervisible death. To be infected was to face exclusion, eviction, and isolation to a point of social death, such that to be HIV positive was to be transformed into the living dead.
Meanwhile the images of skeletal patients succumbing to the consumptive ravages of AIDS mixed with the uncanny horror of infected and leaking bodies burrowed their way into the genre through the medicalised vampirism of Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981) and Tony Scott’s 1983 adaptation of the same name, the bloodborne violence of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and the metamorphic disgust of David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).
Yet in a world of antiretrovirals and PrEP, where undetectable = untransmittable, and where contracting HIV is no longer a death sentence, has horror’s relationship with AIDS changed?
Here I explore what films like Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral (2012), David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022) can tell us about these changes, and what these changes mean for the future of sex, death, and consumption in horror.
- The HIV/AIDS Crisis of the 80s accelerated so rapidly and with such intensity through multiple marginalized communities that it is easy to imagine the disease as some terrible and hungry force consuming entire communities just as it consumed the bodies of those infected.
Panel 4A – Eco-Gothic Networks
- Vicky Brewster: Fungal Growths and Hive Minds: Consuming Humanity in Contemporary Sporror Fiction
- While the consumption of humans by fungal growths is not a new subgenre of horror, it is nevertheless enjoying a proliferation in Gothic fiction, such as in MR Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) (also its film adaptation [2016]), Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020), and T Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead (2022), as well as the video game franchise The Last of Us (2013-2022) and its television adaptation (2023). The subgenre is popular enough to have spawned its own descriptive portmanteau in the horror community: sporror. In sporror texts, fungi consume human hosts in order to live and thrive, a passive consumption for survival which nevertheless kills or renders control over its human hosts. However, through their fungal networks, these growths not only consume but control, transcending the human to provide some kind of connected existence. The act of consumption renders the human-food-victim both less than and more than human, in that they are often killed or zombified, but also enjoy a consciousness that connects to something larger, an arguably superior hive-mind lifeform. This paper will make a survey of fungal consumption fiction to explore emerging trends and ecogothic possibilities within this popular subgenre, utilising Fred Botting’s Gothic Romanced as a conceptual framework. It aims to problematise the assumption of humanity as a superior existence, demonstrating both the ecogothic threat of humanity’s consumption/destruction by nature, and the rewilding of humanity suggesting a desired return to nature as a ‘better’ way of living in the twenty-first century.
- Gerardo López Lozada: The “vegetable-animal or animal-vegetable”: Monstrous Wilderness and Gothic Sublimity in Lucy H. Hooper’s Carnivorine
- Late nineteenth-century killer-plant stories can be said to be symptomatic of fin-de-siècle fears and anxieties about degeneration and interspecies transgression. Charles Darwin’s theories about plant anomalies and deviations certainly fed fantasies of botanic monstrosity at the time. These were reflected to some degree in classic short stories of the botanical gothic such as H. G. Well’s “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The American Tale”.
In Lucy H. Hooper’s short story, Carnivorine, a Drosera plant created by a mad scientist, is portrayed as a femme fatale who sinks his creator into destruction. Described as neither vegetable nor animal, this antediluvian creature has a vampiric quality in that it consumes not only meat but also the life and soul of his creator. The suggestion that this hybrid monster develops the ability to move through “paddle-like” feet taps into a very particular concern (now ecoGothic) of the era: plants may deviate into carnivorous creatures and develop a locomotive faculty and, therefore, may pose a threat to civilization.
Carnivorine revolves around the search for Julius, a mad scientist who happens to live in voluntary seclusion in the Roman Campagna because he’s doing research on insectivorous plants. He sets up a sort of laboratory in a freakish villa that has fallen into ruin due to an immeasurable mass of vegetation that seems to be taking on a life of its own devouring the building and its surroundings. The aim of my talk is to examine how Hooper employs traditional Gothic tropes, mainly botanic ones, so to speak, as a narrative device in order to provoke feelings of fear and uneasiness. I will analyze how these feelings are grounded on the sublime as a tool for altering the perception of the traditional binary animal/plant.
- Late nineteenth-century killer-plant stories can be said to be symptomatic of fin-de-siècle fears and anxieties about degeneration and interspecies transgression. Charles Darwin’s theories about plant anomalies and deviations certainly fed fantasies of botanic monstrosity at the time. These were reflected to some degree in classic short stories of the botanical gothic such as H. G. Well’s “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The American Tale”.
- Eser Pehlivan: The Poisonous Gothic and the Unbounded Castle in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
- Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) overlays the way for freedom from the rigid bounds of capitalistic consumption in the shape of poisonous mushrooms, which becomes the origin point for the dismantling of the material and symbolic confines of the familial home. Jackson’s haunting novel takes place in a small town, and focuses on two sisters whose family died under suspicious circumstances. The parallel created between the image of the house of a wealthy family in the novel, and the implied Gothic castle of the title sustain the way the everyday horrors of a rigid, capitalistic and patriarchal society are frustrated by a narrative emphasis on the Gothic genres’ relation to consumption. As it is implied, and later revealed that with the older sister’s knowledge of deadly mushrooms the youngest sister poisoned their family. At the heart of the novel lies capitalistic consumption, which is circumvented by what I will call a “parasitic” intervention to the modes of normalized consuming through both the knowledge and the use of mushrooms. Borrowing the term from David Punter, this parasitic intervention will be read as Jackson using the nature of Gothic to create a separate space that challenges the symbolic and cultural connotations of the patriarchal house as a Gothic “castle.” This paper will argue that through alternative knowledge, the sisters achieve fluidity and liminality by thwarting the symbols that the familial home makes concrete, therefore, highlighting Gothic genres relationship with consumption as a parasitic double that can forge a space for social interdependence outside the bounds of the normal.
Panel 4B – Monstrous Girlhood
- Rai Powell: Menarche, Monstrosity, and Magic – Destigmatising menstruation in Gothic Young Adult Literature
- Menstruation is a normal, and often inevitable, bodily function, yet it is still considered taboo. Periods, and their associated bleeding, continue to be shrouded in guilt, shame, and mortification. Despite being a natural part of female adolescent life, we rarely see depictions of menstruation in Young Adult literature. What if Bella Swan had to avoid her new vampire family during “that time of the month?” What if Katniss Everdeen had horrendous menstrual cramps on the day she volunteered as tribute, and did she take tampons into battle with her? Periods are suspiciously absent in these narratives, despite countless fan-fiction stories answering these very questions. However, menstruation appears more frequently in horror narratives, often depicted as the moment a female character comes into her powers. It is considered monstrous and dangerous.
In my practice-led research, I am ascertaining the challenges of writing a novel featuring an autistic female protagonist whose supernatural powers are triggered by her menarche. I will investigate the reasons menstruation is used more commonly within the horror genre and why this topic continues to have such a stigma attached to it. I also plan to explore whether writing about menstrual power within a Gothic young-adult novel would further perpetuate that stigma or take a small step towards eradicating it. I plan to use my novel to celebrate not only menstruation and female autism but diversity as a whole by including characters of a range of genders, sexualities, and races. I propose that my work will begin to destigmatise discussions around menstruation for all genders.
The thing that makes Lyla powerful is the one thing that could make her a monster.
After the mysterious death of her mother, sixteen-year-old Lyla Black is sent to live with her uncle on a claustrophobic island in the middle of the Irish Sea. After meeting a group of witches, she starts to bleed.
After the blood comes power, magic, lust, horror, and a fight for survival. A fight that just might destroy her.
- Menstruation is a normal, and often inevitable, bodily function, yet it is still considered taboo. Periods, and their associated bleeding, continue to be shrouded in guilt, shame, and mortification. Despite being a natural part of female adolescent life, we rarely see depictions of menstruation in Young Adult literature. What if Bella Swan had to avoid her new vampire family during “that time of the month?” What if Katniss Everdeen had horrendous menstrual cramps on the day she volunteered as tribute, and did she take tampons into battle with her? Periods are suspiciously absent in these narratives, despite countless fan-fiction stories answering these very questions. However, menstruation appears more frequently in horror narratives, often depicted as the moment a female character comes into her powers. It is considered monstrous and dangerous.
- Helena Blak: Consum(at)ing Girlhood: Horror, Gender, and a Re-reexamination of Jennifer’s Body (2009)
- Between its initial release in 2009 and its ten-year anniversary in 2019, the horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body, went from being considered a failed “sex romp for straight teen boys” (Grady) to a feminist cult classic. Largely praised for its humorous and subversive interpretation of a rape-revenge fantasy wrapped up in a deliciously supernatural slasher-flick, the modern reception has primarily focused on the movie’s criticism of men and the patriarchy and its representation of the young-adult female experience through the character of Jennifer – and her body.
In this paper, I reexamine the movie, centering my analysis on the narrator-protagonist Needy rather than the monstrous Jennifer, taking my point of the departure in the seminal works of Barbara Creed, The Monstruous-Feminine from 1993, and Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws from 1992.
I explore the ways in which the movie engages with and subverts tropes of horror cinema concerning gender, in particular the way horror cinema historically consumes feminine bodies and identities. I discuss the way in which even the feminist reception of Jennifer’s Body conceptualises the female body as something to be consumed by the cinematic gaze, and, drawing upon Clover’s theory of The Final Girl, the character of the young girl-heroine to be consumed by masculine coding.
Ultimately, I present a feminist re-interpretation of the film that focuses on the relationship between the two main female characters, Needy and Jennifer, and their shared coming-of-age. I compare the way gendered consumption is depicted as both monstrous and destructive, as well as unifying and inspiring growth in ravenous rapture.
- Between its initial release in 2009 and its ten-year anniversary in 2019, the horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body, went from being considered a failed “sex romp for straight teen boys” (Grady) to a feminist cult classic. Largely praised for its humorous and subversive interpretation of a rape-revenge fantasy wrapped up in a deliciously supernatural slasher-flick, the modern reception has primarily focused on the movie’s criticism of men and the patriarchy and its representation of the young-adult female experience through the character of Jennifer – and her body.
- Samantha Miles: Bloody Teeth and Bloody Tights: Vampiric Girlhood in Contemporary Playwriting
- The transformative years of adolescent girlhood are infused with the desire to consume, marked by a plague of issues with body image and sexual development that could rival the monstrous symbolism of a vampiric transformation. Although the vampire has experienced many cinematic rebirths since being popularised by the Victorians as an image of sexual voraciousness, the contemporary stage continues to dramatize adolescent bloodlust in ways that cannot be rivalled outside of a live theatre. With reference to feminist theatre theory and its critiques of conservative realism, this paper will examine how four play texts, two original and two adaptations, use the uncanny theatrical form to channel the vampire through the lens of adolescent girlhood. Those texts are Dance Nation (2018) by Clare Barron, Cuddles (2011) by Joseph Wilde, Let the Right One In (2013) adapted by Jack Thorne, and Dracula (1985) adapted by Liz Lochhead.
My primary discussion focuses on the connection between content and delivery in these play texts; how might a young woman’s desire to consume be reflected in the scene structure or the pacing of dialogue? I will additionally argue that each play text transforms into an organic adolescence of its own, presenting itself as a piece of theatrical literature to be consumed by readers before its final metamorphosis onto the live stage. Through the structured placement of dialogue and cartographical stage directions on the page, I will analyse how these play texts are able to communicate a textual bloodlust independently from the immortal characters they present.
- The transformative years of adolescent girlhood are infused with the desire to consume, marked by a plague of issues with body image and sexual development that could rival the monstrous symbolism of a vampiric transformation. Although the vampire has experienced many cinematic rebirths since being popularised by the Victorians as an image of sexual voraciousness, the contemporary stage continues to dramatize adolescent bloodlust in ways that cannot be rivalled outside of a live theatre. With reference to feminist theatre theory and its critiques of conservative realism, this paper will examine how four play texts, two original and two adaptations, use the uncanny theatrical form to channel the vampire through the lens of adolescent girlhood. Those texts are Dance Nation (2018) by Clare Barron, Cuddles (2011) by Joseph Wilde, Let the Right One In (2013) adapted by Jack Thorne, and Dracula (1985) adapted by Liz Lochhead.
Panel 5A – Food and Feasting
- Bronte Crawford: ‘The monstrous sight of my husband eating’: Gothic Modes of Consumption in Contemporary Japanese Fiction
- As gastrocentric Gothic media begins to proliferate in the West, from the 2022 film The Menu to the horror cooking simulator Ravenous Devils released the same year, little critical attention has yet been given to the nuances of how the Gothic mode as presented through atypical, non-Western perspectives can alter and in turn be altered by representations of consumption. In response, this paper evaluates the short stories of Japanese authors Sayaka Murata and Yoko Ogawa as narratives depicting a specifically ‘Gothic’ mode of consumption, utilising this to destabilise notions of femininity, sexuality, and ecology that are conventionally accepted in Japan, and indeed much of the Anglophone world. Drawing on Charles Shirō Inouye’s concepts of the ‘Pangothic’ and ‘bivalent ambiguity’ as they pertain to Japanese Gothic media (2012), as well as Tomoko Aoyama’s assessment of food’s societal significance in pre-twentieth century Japan (2023), I examine acts of consumption, abstinence, and food preparation in the collections Life Ceremony (trans. 2022) and Revenge (1998, 2013), in order to demonstrate how these texts use the Gothic mode to represent food and eating as signifiers of vulnerability to and rebellion against contemporary hierarchies of power in a Japanese context. By reading these texts in the context of Japan’s unique and complex relationship with what Western scholars have traditionally identified as the ‘Gothic’, I interrogate the nature of the mode itself as an articulation of politicised desires and fears, reorienting readers’ attention to the significance of food beyond the merely metaphorical. Therefore, this reading of food in the (Japanese) Gothic mode aims to restore narrative agency to acts of eating, cooking, and to food itself, exploring how these elements speak back to the Gothic mode, and using a gastrocritical reading to centre the exploration of perspectives and identities that haunt the margins of the present.
- Catherine Greenwood: Siberian Spring: Midsummer’s Eve
- Siberian Spring: Midsummer’s Eve
when revenant beasts from sod arise
to trod the steppe with rotted eyes
then comes the hour of the feast …
Siberia. It’s Midsummer’s Eve and the mammoth-tusk hunters are having a feast. What’s on the menu? I will be reading a sequence of poems from my PhD poetry manuscript-in-progress titled Siberian Spring. This group of poems, provisionally titled ‘Midsummer’s Eve’, are centered around a celebratory feast night enjoyed by hunters of ice-ivory and their unwitting guest, a scientist who both observes and participates in a bush banquet quiet unlike anything he’s experienced before. This poetic fiction draws on both urban myth and reportage, and the mise-en-scene is Siberia, and the tusk-hunters camps and mines where valuable ice-age cryptids are extracted from thawing permafrost.
- Siberian Spring: Midsummer’s Eve
Panel 5B – Imperialisms I
- Charlotte Boyce: Violent Appetites and Arctic Exploitation: Consuming Anxieties in James Hogg’s ‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’
- Published posthumously in 1837, James Hogg’s ‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’ is one of a number of nineteenth-century tales to turn to the Arctic as a staging ground for Gothic adventure. In doing so, it undertakes a subtle critique of what Alan Bewell has called ‘imperial geophagy’, in which ‘the capacity to rule the world is signified by one’s ability to consume it’. When the whaling ship the Anne Forbes is crushed by the polar ice, Allan Gordon – the sole survivor of the wreck – must overcome both the hostile environment in which he finds himself and the insistent threat of starvation in order to survive. He does so through a combination of ingenuity and serendipity, before eventually being rescued by a passing ship and returned to his homeland. On the surface, then, ‘The Surpassing Adventures’ can be read as a paean to the resourcefulness, resilience and superiority of white British masculinity. Underlying this jingoistic reading, however, are a number of tacit anxieties about the implications and effects of ecological and anthropocentric exploitation. While Gordon consistently attributes his survival to the unseen workings of divine Providence, his ability to secure a consistent supply of food within the northern ice floes is in fact largely dependent on his polar bear companion, Nancy, with whom he enjoys a complex master-slave relationship. What is more, although Gordon complacently views himself as a representative of ‘civilization’, he is shown repeatedly to embrace and enact the predatory – and sometimes cannibalistic – appetites that he projects onto the Arctic space and its ‘monstrous’ inhabitants. Thus, the apparently triumphalist narrative of Hogg’s text actually makes troublingly visible the violent and exploitative relationships that typically characterised nineteenth-century Britain’s interactions with ‘other’ peoples, animals and the natural world.
- Janette Leaf: The Consumer becomes the Consumed: Late-Victorian Egyptianised Gothic and Orientalist Art
- This interdisciplinary paper considers the consumption of an Ancient Egyptian past through the European acquisition of artefacts, and the representation of that past in late-Victorian Egyptianised Gothic and nineteenth-century Orientalist art. Its methodology is to take two core texts of Marie Corelli’s Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899), both of which feature Orientalist artists mentally and physically destroyed by vengeful supernatural Egyptians. It approaches them with reference to contemporaneous artists and their paintings, and their influence on the books’ materiality and plot. Within both narratives, it considers the artistic mind consumed by an overriding obsession. It argues that the painters whose rich brown pigments were comprised of the crushed corpses of Egyptians are then effectively consumed by the titular undead Egyptians. With Gothic circularity, the consumer becomes the consumed.
Corelli’s eponymous Ziska is an undying Egyptian dancer, Charmazel, obsessed with a mix of vengeance and passion for her erstwhile lover and murderer. In the novel, he is the warrior Araxes, reincarnated as the celebrated painter of Eastern women, Armand Gervase. He is obsessed with Ziska but cannot bring her likeness to canvas. His fate is to be incarcerated with her beneath the Great Pyramid, but his penitence and her forgiveness lift the curse.
Boothby’s Eponymous Pharos is an undying, ancient Priest magician obsessed with returning his own mummy to its rightful resting place from which it has been stolen by an archaeologist and passed down to his son, Cyril Forrester, an Orientalist painter. Vengeful Pharos, producer of drugged Egyptian cigarettes and hallucinogenic potions, compels Forrester to consume them and then manufactures a virulent disease to eat away at the health of Forrester’s whole rotten European society, making the painter the plague’s patient zero.
Within the texts, both fictional artists, having consumed an Egypt made accessible by archaeologists, artists, and, ironically, by novelists, commodify it still more in their creation of art for consumption by the European public. Gothic metes out grim justice as the consumers of Egypt becomes the consumed. One ending is personal and redemptive, the other not. This paper argues that Gothic also rewards its writers as their tales are consumed by the reading public.
- This interdisciplinary paper considers the consumption of an Ancient Egyptian past through the European acquisition of artefacts, and the representation of that past in late-Victorian Egyptianised Gothic and nineteenth-century Orientalist art. Its methodology is to take two core texts of Marie Corelli’s Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899), both of which feature Orientalist artists mentally and physically destroyed by vengeful supernatural Egyptians. It approaches them with reference to contemporaneous artists and their paintings, and their influence on the books’ materiality and plot. Within both narratives, it considers the artistic mind consumed by an overriding obsession. It argues that the painters whose rich brown pigments were comprised of the crushed corpses of Egyptians are then effectively consumed by the titular undead Egyptians. With Gothic circularity, the consumer becomes the consumed.
- Beverley Thomas: ‘Food, Eating and Feeding’
- In 2019, I began to think about doing a PhD; it would be a creative writing doctorate that captured the stories of the Windrush Generation and their descendants, like Levy’s Six Stories and an Essay; but mine would be 9 stories and an exegesis. Then in 2020 I attended some Sheffield Gothic reading sessions and a conference that Maisha Wester facilitated; and subsequently became consumed by the idea that the Black experience could be retold through a gothic lens. Thus, my presentation for this conference will start with a 5-minute introduction explaining why my creative approach in many of my stories is gothic – the way this style of writing enables me to employ dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread; whilst exploring topics such as slavery, colonialism, sexuality, and the Black British experience. Then I will introduce the background to the story I sent called X which contains an extreme element of feeding in it. Since I have sent the story, I won’t break it down here, but just to say that the reading of the story will take 10 minutes; and whilst I don’t want to go into all the story now, I need to include a warning that the protagonist comes to a gory end, where he eats himself in his attempt to take back control over his slave master and overseer. His last words are ‘Empty, empty…’; this his last act of resistance to a slave system that sought to dehumanise the Black body.
Sheffield Gothic 