Torchlit walks, hillside candlelit poetry readings, maypole dancing - it can only be the bi-annual festival of Gothickry that is the Coleridge Summer Conference

For anyone working on The Walking Dead, here's a CFP for a new upcoming collection. The deadline for abstracts is mid-August, paper required by mid-September. Dead Inside: The Walking Dead and the Problem of Meaning in the New Millennium In the early twenty-first century, zombies are everywhere—in film (Land of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Dead Snow, Rammbock, The Horde), fiction (Stephen King’s Cell, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Max Brooks’ World War Z, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead), social movements (zombie walks and the Zombie Research Society ), classrooms (Zombi

Cannibals Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture 25-26 April 2013 Manchester, United Kingdom From contemporary horror film to medieval Eucharistic devotions, from Freudian theory to science fiction, cannibals and cannibalism continue to repel and intrigue us in equal measure. This two-day interdisciplinary conference will explore humanity’s relationships with, and attitudes towards, cannibalism, whether fascination, horror or purely practical considerations. Papers are sought from all disciplines, including but not limited to literature, film studies, history, anthropology, archaeology, p

Sian MacArthur, Crime and the Gothic Reviewed by Honora Wilson The term “Gothic” is so colloquialized in our culture and is so often haphazardly applied to any work that makes mention of haunted castles or supernatural villains that it can seem to have lost its utility and become an amorphous, and thus meaningless, category to make fiction sound more enticing. And while such slapdash labeling is successful, it does sap the genre’s particular, and peculiar, character from our cultural lexicon. This is unfortunate for, as Sian MacArthur’s book Crime and the Gothic aptly demonst

Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queering Others in Victorian Gothic: transgressing monstrosity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012) ISBN 978-0-7083-2464-6 In the last ten years, there have been a number of studies that have explored how the gothic is ‘always-already’ a queer genre, using the insights of queer critical theory as it has been articulated by theorists from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick onwards. Ardel Haefele’s Thomas’s new study takes this critical enquiry one step further by showing us how the ‘monstrous Other’, specifically in terms of ‘foreigness’, is often queer, and re

CALL FOR PAPERS - Devils and Dolls: Dichotomous Depictions of ‘The Child’ Wednesday 27 March 2013 University of Bristol, Graduate School of Arts and Humanities

On July 20th, Christopher Nolan's much acclaimed Dark Knight Trilogy will come to its conclusion with the already-in-the-bank blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. So much critical ink has been spilled about the first two installments, from the deployment of gothic anti-hero tropes to the atmospheric return of a grayscale Gotham City watched over by a brooding Wayne Manor, that it hardly seems necessary to preemptively trod these worn paths again. In fact, there is a wonderful interrogation of Heath Ledger's Joker and the narratives of trauma done by Catherine Spooner on this blogsite [July 2008]

'On reaching the water-side, a spectacle at once sublime and appalling busrt upon my eye – St. Stephen’s Chapel in flames, with the House of Lords a little further to the south, and (the sensation which I felt at the sight as an antiquary and a British subject, I shall not easily forget) the gable of Westminster Hall, contiguous to the fire, apparently alight in two or three places! –'