At the core of the Gothic, through all its manifestations, lies the monster: the ghost, the demon, the freak, the creature, the outcast, the Other.
Wildhorn’s Jekyll and Hyde last month, Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies last week - I’ve been experiencing the contemporary Gothic musical lately. Whilst thinking about the ways in which music may be presented as Gothic, I started wondering how they did it in eighteenth-century theatre. As I was going to the British Library anyway, I decided to see what I could find out from their archives about the music of Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre. This seemed the most obvious work to start investigating, for whilst reading the play I had noticed the prominence given to the name of th
The headline in the Toronto Sun today certainly caught my eye.
For those of you still reading the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries, Dead Reckoning was published last month. Strange choice of cover. True Blood Season 3 will be available on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 Those of you still following True Blood will probably have already seen the trailer released for season 4, which premieres June 26, 2011. Interesting that Alan Ball has declared this the season of the witch - there's a definite trend in the air (more coming up soon on this site about fabulous book called Witches on the Road Tonight): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPSnb0
OUP have put up a series of podcasts with Roger Luckhurst, who has edited a new edition of Dracula for Oxford World's Classics series. http://blog.oup.com/2011/05/dracula-2/
Well, I saw Love Never Dies last week – and am still digesting it. I’ve never in my life, apart from in detective fiction, come across such an unexpected ending. More of that another time. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about performance in relation to eighteenth-century Gothic as I’ve been going over the proofs for an article I’ve written which looks at Strawberry Hill and Fonthill Abbey. I’ve also been writing on Matthew Lewis’s plays. This turned out to be a useful conjunction as it forced me to think about performance not just in relation to houses, masquerades
Waller examines the interactions between the living and the undead via a broad range of classic and contemporary films, plays, novels, stories, and made-for-television movies.
Capturing Witches: Histories, Stories, Images 400 years after the Lancashire Witches Lancaster University 17-19 August 2012
For centuries the world's oceans have inspired mankind with an unparallelled sense of fascination and terror. I believe that it is true to say that more is known about outer space than is known about the world's own oceans. Ever since the first mariners began to explore the seas there have been tales of great monsters that have emerged from its depths to prey on the unwary. These tales have developed and evolved over time and have provided fuel for some of our great writers and film makers imaginations.
To what extent are horror and crime fictions increasingly bleeding into each other? This is the main question to be addressed at the next Twisted Tales event...