What is a gothic body? Is there such as thing? Various scholars have theorised gothic embodiment and physical difference in gothic works, testifying to the specific corporeal side to the gothic. Bodies marked as different can, as evidenced in these works, become inextricable linked to the gothic or explored in gothic writing. This blog post will focus on a specific physical 'difference' or marked body, namely the body disabled by amputation. Examining Lon Chaney's characterisation of an amputee in The Unknown (1927), I will explore what amputation might mean when marked as different or other, and how amputation might take on different affective significations.

‘I’m making science-fiction films because it strikes me that our experience of the world in our everyday lives is pretty much a technological, science-fictional one. And when you add the human element to that, there you’ve got your horror covered. With our disconnection and increasing hollowness amongst the increasing noise, real, lived life seems to have become science-fiction horror itself.’ George A. Romero, director of the gothic horror classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), has talked about the hardships of independent filmmaking in various occasions: the lack of resources,

www.qub.ac.uk/romanticlacunae We invite paper and panel proposals on topics related to silences, disjunctions, and absences in Romantic-era texts, for a one-day conference hosted by the School of English and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen’s University Belfast on 2 August, 2013. The keynote speaker will be Dr Fiona Price, Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester. The conference is interested in exploring the power of silences and absences in the literature of the period c.1780-1830. During this time there is significant cultural emphasis on what is

CFP Collection: The Films of Dario Argento Cited as an important influence to filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Gaspar Noé, Italian director Dario Argento occupies a curious position in film history. With a career spanning more than 40 years, in which he’s made more than 20 films, Argento has attracted relatively little critical attention in the academy. With the only sustained (English-language) book-length consideration of the director’s work being first released more than 20 years ago, this collection seeks to explore Argento’s films through a range of analytical and method

If, as Fred Botting has posited, the gothic is characterised by transgression as well as excess, then necrophilia might be one of the most gothic sexual practices. Transgressing the bounds of reality and possibility, Botting states, gothic narratives may 'subvert rational codes of understanding' and thus 'blurring definitions of reason and morality' (6). Often considered the most horrible or unspeakable of sexual aberrations, necrophilia – a sexual attraction to corpses – could arguably be considered the ultimate transgression between life and death. Cast as a kind of gothic sexuality, necrophilia might work to question established social orders and norms. And, as I hope to sketch out in this post, female necrophilia might work also as a specifically gendered transgression.

Swan River Press has announced recently that it is set to publish a new bi-annual journal: The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature. The first edition is available to preorder now and, among other topics, it contains essays on Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish Gothic, and Conor McPherson. According to the Swan River Press website, the journal will be aimed at a general readership and will feature "commentaries, articles, and reviews on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic literature." In terms of a further guide to its scholarly content, the publishers sug

Book Review: Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries. This collection of sixteen essays edited by Christopher MacLachlan, John Patrick Pazdziora and Ginger Stelle sets out to 'look directly at MacDonald the Victorian.' To achieve this the essays are collected into four thematic sections: ‘Belief and Scepticism’, ‘Social Reform and Gender’, ‘Ideals and Nightmares’, and ‘Scotland’. The broad scope of thematic concerns covered in the book allows the reader to gain a strong idea of MacDonald's role and his place beside his Victorian contemporaries.

Fans of Gothic fiction should note that Gothic Press -- which for some years has published widely on the Gothic -- has a new web address. You can access the new site at http://www.gothlitdata.com/gothicpress.html. Also, take a look at their very interesting Gothic Chapbook series: http://www.gothlitdata.com/gothchap.html

Review: Lynn Shepherd's A Treacherous Likeness (Corsair, 2013) *Some Spoilers* Few can dispute the fascinating and mysterious nature of the lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. Lynn Shepherd's new novel, A Treacherous Likeness is a wonderfully Gothic and thrilling attempt to understand the silences and gaps surrounding the Shelleys that history fails to provide for. Her third novel, following her style of historical detective fiction, delves even deeper into the realms of both biographical truth and literary license, as Shepherd re-imagines and exposes some of the secrets that h

After last week’s blog on the critical category of the ‘female Gothic’, this week I’m going to look at the gendering of genres from a different perspective. After all, twentieth-century critics were not the first to connect gender and genre. Eighteenth-century commentary tends to gender the Gothic, too, and this discourse informs the period’s literature ... I’m interested in how eighteenth-century women writers could manipulate the gendered expectations that surrounded their architectural settings. It seems to me that Gothic architecture invited gendered readings, but that its gendered status was also hugely ambivalent. That ambivalence was then open to exploitation.