- 9:00am – 9:30am
Registration - 9:30am – 9:40am
Opening Remarks - 9:40am – 11:00am
Panel One – Imperialisms II - 11:00am – 11:10am
Break - 11:10am – 12:30am
Panel Two – Mothering and Female Networks - 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Lunch - 1:30pm – 3:00pm
Creative Writing Workshop with Leonie Rowland - 3:00pm – 3:10pm
Break - 3:10pm – 4:30pm
Panel Three – Meat Consumption and Capitalist Consumption - 4:30pm – 5:00pm
Closing Remarks
(Please note all times are GMT)
Panel 1: Imperialisms II
- Benjamin Wylde: ‘Daughter of the Nile’
- A resurrected mummy is a staple of the literary gothic-horror genre, and one of its earliest known archetypes. Furthermore, it lends expression to a continued fascination with Ancient Egypt, a romance with a long dead culture. There are so many mummy stories that hold such an indelible attraction for their readers, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No. 249 (1892) and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) But it is cinema that has heavily influenced public perception of mummies. The 1932 film The Mummy, as portrayed by Boris Karloff, being the most popular and an undeniable cinematic icon. And though it may be weak facsimiles of historical fact, their propensity to entertain cannot be denied. Taking inspiration from past examples (most notably the Victorian setting); I wanted to reinvent the mummy narrative, drawing on my own perspective as a gay author. My short story is a tragic tale of terror; an unnamed protagonist narrates an encounter with the resurrected mummy of Princess Imnt, as he endeavours to help his friend and, it is implied; former lover, archaeologist Henry McArthur as he finds himself a target of the mummy; cursed to protect the sarcophagus of her murdered brother. However, the Princess is not quite the monster she appears. Daughter of the Nile reconciles an historically inaccurate (though aesthetically significant and influential) past with the diverse present, by subverting expectation as a queer narrative that explores themes of alienation, betrayal and grief, as well as presenting more historically accurate, and properly researched, minutiae. One that takes the frightening mummy of gothic tradition and film convention, and renders it a sympathetic victim of circumstance.
- Lauren Bruce: Devouring the Mummified Dead: Travel, Egyptomania, and Consuming the Gothic Corpse
- The wave of Egyptomania peaked during the nineteenth century where European explorers roamed the sands of Egypt to find the ultimate souvenir: an ancient Egyptian mummy. These ancient Egyptian human remains were dismembered, and their body parts illegally smuggled to Britain where they had been the subject of morbid curiosity. Using texts published in the long nineteenth century by Amelia Edwards, Pierre Loti, and St. John James Augustus, I establish the mummy as a Gothic corpse. Their descriptions of the mummy provide a unique Gothic portrayal of ancient Egyptian mummies which offers a place for these historical accounts in the Gothic literary canon.
In addition to curios souvenirs, mummies were known to be ground up into a powder called ‘mummia.’ This was used to create a colour of paint called ‘mummy brown,’ popular amongst the Pre-Raphaelites. Consuming these remains visually, either by souvenir or artwork, was not the only form of extreme ‘Egyptomania;’ mummia was also ingested, boasting medicinal qualities curing anything from a headache to internal bleeding. As is expected, this was not the case. However, it leads to conversations about the Gothic body, and how society perceived the ancient Egyptian corpse during the Victorian Era.
This paper explores the combination of the figurative and literal consumption of ancient Egyptian mummies. By examining the mummy as a Gothic body in a historical context, I aim to bridge the gap between travel studies and the Gothic. The Gothic lens also allows the analysis of the morbid historical context surrounding people eating ground up mummies; arguably, the mummy’s identity is being consumed by the Gothic itself. Moreover, as I focus on visual and internal consumption culture, my paper hereby provides new insights into current debates about displaying human remains in museums and galleries.
- The wave of Egyptomania peaked during the nineteenth century where European explorers roamed the sands of Egypt to find the ultimate souvenir: an ancient Egyptian mummy. These ancient Egyptian human remains were dismembered, and their body parts illegally smuggled to Britain where they had been the subject of morbid curiosity. Using texts published in the long nineteenth century by Amelia Edwards, Pierre Loti, and St. John James Augustus, I establish the mummy as a Gothic corpse. Their descriptions of the mummy provide a unique Gothic portrayal of ancient Egyptian mummies which offers a place for these historical accounts in the Gothic literary canon.
- Madelyn Walsh: Resisting Consumption: Exaqua in Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts
- The slave ship Zong has an infamous legacy that casts a long shadow. In 1781, the crew of the Zong had thrown 132 Africans overboard to their death to secure the dwindling supplies of water, and to allow the William Gregson slave-trading syndicate to claim their losses through well-established maritime insurance protocols. This paper will explore how Fred D’Aguiar’s neo-slave narrative Feeding the Ghosts (1997) returns to the Zong Massacre and interrogates the commodification of Black bodies as part of the British legal system that upheld transatlantic slavery and consequently led to the atrocities committed onboard the Zong. I argue that D’Aguiar utilises the motif of consumption to interrogate the British systems and discourses that commodified the enslaved as cargo against the broader backdrop of the global commerce of trafficking of enslaved Africans. The ocean in D’Aguiar’s novel operates as a Gothic seascape. It acts as both executioner and consumer because human bodies are eaten alive within the eco-system of the sea. This paper focuses on the ways in which the materiality of the sea fuels acts of consumption in the novel, which I contend are resisted through the act of exaqua for the protagonist Mintah. Exaqua can be identified by the submergence and emergence of a subject from the water. The process must also reveal either a voice, story, or body from the water, thereby salvaging a narrative that would have been lost to the sea. As Mintah resurfaces from the ocean, she redefines the boundaries of reality for a drowned human body in the novel. Through exaqua, Mintah defies the commodification placed upon her as an enslaved person, and I analyse how exaqua resists the hungry and consuming grasp of both the sea and the oppressor.
Panel 2: Mothering and Female Networks
- Li-Hui Tsai: Maria and Frankenstein
- A creative writing piece that illustrates the themes of death, resurrection and consumption in nineteen-century gothic literature and a revival of the gothic in the age of digital entertainment in our times. Maria and Frankenstein is a novel that explores the ways authors and readers adapt to the increasing demands of consuming gender, feelings, and the gothic in the age of mass media. It envisages in particular the ways Romantic-period authors can be transported by manic readers from the world of the dead to the world of the living and how the relationship between science and the supernatural can be developed in a fantasy world of authors and readers. The characters and events are loosely based on the lives and works of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Maria is a woman who died of a heart attack during the process of a child birth at a hospital in a stormy night and was mysteriously brought back to life by her husband Thomas, who is a cult leader and the founder of a radio station in London. Maria’s story establishes the radio station as a community with its own belief system and mythology. Victoria is a medical student, who, on a trip to London, stole the bones of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft from their graves and replicated their DNA in a remote laboratory in Scotland. Victoria met Thomas and his followers at a graveyard in a wintry night and considered accepting Thomas’s invitation to work with him to bridge the mortal and the supernatural worlds. This novel gives voice to Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, and the struggles of women and authors in a gothic inspired world, where readers believed that the public and private lives of authors should continue to be made available for public consumption even longer after they were gone to the underworld.
- Ella Alton: Anticipating the Gothic: Nuns, Consumption and the Monstrous Feminine in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1651)
- A century prior to the advent of the Gothic proper, Andrew Marvell’s estate poem ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1651) depicts the Catholic haunting of a Protestant family estate. The nuns of Appleton House seduce a young, and pretty maiden, engage in spurious and novel forms of non-biological reproduction, preserve and feast on fruit and ‘pastes’, and wage war on male interlopers with the ‘cannons’ of their lungs and the ‘weapons’ of their tongues. In this lightning talk, I suggest that antecedents of the gothic can be found in early modern depictions of nuns and convents, wherein both horror and morbid fascination are inspired at the intersection of Catholicism and femininity. As an early modernist, I also wish to take this opportunity to put the topic of ‘Nuns’ to the hive mind of Sheffield Gothic; I welcome musings, feedback and reading recommendations more widely.
- Catrin Lloyd: ‘Motherthing: The Consumption of Womanhood’
- Motherthing (2022) written by Ainslie Hogarth, a darkly humorous literary addition to the New or Modern Gothic genre, examines a complex range of consuming behaviours enacted both by society, and by women. This research paper submission shall explore Motherthing’s obsession with all that is consuming; from the physical consumption of bodily matter through murderous cannibalism, to the psychologically and spiritually eroding impacts of excessive and gendered criticism. Whilst a highlighted focus shall be placed upon this Modern Gothic text, frequent links shall be made to the texts which characterised the ‘original Gothic,’ particularly Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Despite over one hundred years separating both novels, they share intriguing depictions of female gender roles, and each female character’s response to these roles forced upon them by external society. Seemingly grappling with whether to accept or reject the role of the late-Victorian ‘New Woman,’ Dracula’s main female character Mina is relegated to an assistant rather than an active agent, contrasting entirely to those in Hogarth’s Motherthing. This research paper shall emphasise how gender plays an emphasised role within the consuming nature of the Gothic in Motherthing, however, focusing upon the ultimate criticism of the feminine. The provision of feminist criticism shall stress the consuming nature of sexist stereotypical roles such as those of the obsessive mother, partner, and ‘bad daughter’ which haunt its main female characters. Whilst these consuming roles have been exacerbated by centuries of patriarchal control and dominance, this research paper shall suggest an equally horrifying aspect of the Gothic: that women can also criticise, terrorise, and utterly consume each other in catastrophically chaotic fashion.
Panel 3: Meat Production and Capitalist Production
- Mo O’Neill: ‘Lethargic monsters, foul harpies, and sad-visaged lemures’: Bestial dietetics in Edward Carpenter’s vegetarian imaginary
- My ongoing doctoral research explores the pro-animal thought of late Victorian radical poet, essayist and social reformer Edward Carpenter (1844-1929). My second chapter explores Carpenter’s pro-vegetarian writings, which illuminate his complex and often conflicting perspectives on ethics, aesthetics, and dietetics.
This lightning talk introduces a passage under analysis in this chapter, in which these prevailing themes coalesce within an unusually Gothic account of meat consumption, departing from the typically utopian bent of Carpenter’s thought. In his essay ‘Health: a Conquest’ (1892), Carpenter contends that meat is necessarily tainted; raw flesh, ‘containing as it does highly wrought organic forces’, can produce ‘lethargic monsters, foul harpies, and sad-visaged lemures – which may insist on having their own way, building up an animal body not truly human’. [1] The talk explores the passage’s esoteric combination of nutritional advice and supernatural language: via his image of ‘lemures’, a term taken from Roman religion, referring to the restless spirits of the dead, I link his imagery to the claims of Ancient Roman vegetarians such as Porphyry. I further contextualise the passage within Carpenter’s evolutionary belief that racial groups inherit collective ‘race memories’ within the body: varying norms and values are a product of differing racial interpretations of Platonic ‘ideas’, formative, universal concepts existent in a divine realm prior to experience, such as love and justice. For Carpenter, the disproportionate collective pursuit of negative ideas allows the ‘Agencies or Personalities’ emblematising the idea within individual bodies to ‘take on a maleficent aspect’. [2] I place this context for Carpenter’s bestial dietetic imaginary in dialogue with his broader idealisation of a masterful, self-sustaining and ‘pure’ vegetarian body, protected from uncontrollable animal energies that risk contaminating the boundaries of the human.
- My ongoing doctoral research explores the pro-animal thought of late Victorian radical poet, essayist and social reformer Edward Carpenter (1844-1929). My second chapter explores Carpenter’s pro-vegetarian writings, which illuminate his complex and often conflicting perspectives on ethics, aesthetics, and dietetics.
- Poulomi Chadhury: Ecohorrific Consumption and the Right-Wing Politics in Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat
- In the realms of foodways, cannibalism – or eating the flesh of another human – is often considered the ultimate taboo, while ingesting the flesh of another nonhuman animal is largely permitted in most cultures. Despite this wide acceptance, meat-eating is fraught with a myriad of dietary prohibitions and taboos. It often becomes the nexus of extreme religious aversions and political anxieties. Meat production within the capitalistic mode is also similarly saturated with anxieties around environmental degradation, resource extraction and subjugation of marginalised humans. In my presentation, I argue that the provocations raised by cannibalism in gothic and horror fiction can help expose systemic issues within capitalism by making visible the ideology of violence baked into the very structure of meat production. Through a sustained deliberation of Joseph D’Lacey’s post-apocalyptic fiction Meat (2008), I will illustrate that reading it as an ecohorror text can help expose the environmental havoc wrought by current meat agribusinesses. I link ecohorror with body horror and read the edible bodies as sites where the horrors of becoming nonhuman and, indeed, being treated and eaten as such are revealed. Finally, I cast suspicion upon the question of alimentary purity that Meat seems to offer as a possible antidote to the brutality of industrialised agribusiness. I contend that the text’s depiction of the utopian diet of living on ‘light and air’ reveals a failure to envision a post-meat and post-capitalistic world. Additionally, I argue that by stigmatising veganism, appealing to New Age beliefs, and reasserting religiosity, Meat exposes a persistent issue embedded within some anti-establishment thinking whereby scepticism of the government and existing institutions results in a regressive shift towards right-wing conservatism.
- Bronte Schiltz: “The thirst of avarice”: capitalism and cannibalism in The String of Pearls
- Cannibalism has always been a ripe metaphor for capitalism. As Mark Steven notes in Splatter Capital, ‘Marx’s writing overflows with tropes and figures born of the gothic’, including a ‘taste for human viscera’. Aptly, then, avarice is the inciting force of all the horrors in James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls (1846-7). Rymer cannot even resist mentioning capital during the grisly reveal that the text’s villain, barber Sweeney Todd, kills his clients ‘to cut them up for Mrs Lovett’s pies! after robbing them of all the money and valuables they might have about them.’ No amount of wealth offers security – the affluent fall victim to Todd when they boast of their financial fortuity, and the impoverished to Todd’s accomplice, meat pie baker Mrs. Lovett, when they turn to her in desperation for work. The narrative thus constructs London as an urban Gothic space that is voracious in its appetites.
The penny dreadful engages with the potential dangers of consumption on numerous levels. The horror of Mrs. Lovett’s imprisoned staff on realising that they have cooked human flesh and her customers on realising that they have eaten it is exemplary of Marx’s preoccupation with workers’ alienation from their labour and consumers’ alienation from their purchases. The narrative also plays into contemporary anxieties surrounding food contamination, with the proximity of Lovett’s bakehouse to the city’s sewers replicating a very real nineteenth-century crisis in food hygiene. The treatment of the corpses of people who were impoverished in life as acceptable for consumption – whether in meat pies or operating theatres – and of women as products in sexual and marital contexts also play a recurrent role.
This paper ultimately suggests that Rymer uses Gothic depictions of cannibalism to reveal the true source of horror in urban spaces to be the insatiable forces of capital.
- Cannibalism has always been a ripe metaphor for capitalism. As Mark Steven notes in Splatter Capital, ‘Marx’s writing overflows with tropes and figures born of the gothic’, including a ‘taste for human viscera’. Aptly, then, avarice is the inciting force of all the horrors in James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls (1846-7). Rymer cannot even resist mentioning capital during the grisly reveal that the text’s villain, barber Sweeney Todd, kills his clients ‘to cut them up for Mrs Lovett’s pies! after robbing them of all the money and valuables they might have about them.’ No amount of wealth offers security – the affluent fall victim to Todd when they boast of their financial fortuity, and the impoverished to Todd’s accomplice, meat pie baker Mrs. Lovett, when they turn to her in desperation for work. The narrative thus constructs London as an urban Gothic space that is voracious in its appetites.
Sheffield Gothic 