I want to start this review unprofessionally by making a confession: as a ‘madhouse nerd’, I carry a copy of Roy Porter’s Madness A Brief History (OUP 2002) in my bag for quick reference. This is especially helpful for post-archival walks around Scotland, and it currently sits next to my absinthe spoon (my Gothic version of a Sonic Screwdriver). I am delighted to say that Darryl Jones’ Sleeping With the Lights On is, to me, an equally cherished book. This welcome contribution to horror’s critical bibliography is an extensive resource, though short in length. Sleeping Wi

Date: 3rd – 4th May 2018 Location: University of Edinburgh Website: www.madnessinpopculture.com Deadline: 2nd February 2018     “Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are.” Grant Morrison, Batman: Arkham Asylum (1989)   In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault writes that “madness fascinates man”. Indeed, examples of this dark allure are present throughout the ages. From tales of those who paid a penny on Sundays to view the insane held at London’s Bethlem Hospital in the early nineteenth century, to ever popular portrayals of mental illness an

This blog series has chiefly been concerned with investigating the narrator's fight to establish her own identity in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. The second Mrs. de Winter's almost morbid fascination with Rebecca as a model of the perfect wife, coupled with Mrs. Danvers' cruel treatment and Maxim's refusal to regard his wife as an adult are all contributing factors to the narrator's struggles. However, when the mystery surrounding Rebecca is dispelled and Maxim reveals his crime, a change takes place in the narrator. Far from being surprised by her husband's propensity for murder, she list

In my last post, female identity in Rebecca was discussed and the narrator's goal of being a good wife as an ideal ego, Rebecca as the ego ideal, and Mrs. Danvers as a superego that attempts to tear down the narrator at every turn were established. This week, we will take a look at Maxim's part in the narrator's struggles with identity. Through his infantilization of the second Mrs. de Winter and attempts to protect her innocence, it becomes apparent that Maxim also performs a superego-like function by preventing her from fully embracing her role as a wife. From the moment that they bec

Ellen Moers first coined the term "Female Gothic" to simply refer to Gothic texts written by women. Since then, the field of Female Gothic has expanded to include issues relating to women in these texts, including anxieties surrounding identity and entrapment. Patricia Murphy makes a distinction between Female Gothic of eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, and what she calls New Woman Gothic. She argues that, in earlier texts, "the period preceding marriage typically is fraught with Gothic difficulties such as entrapment whereas, in the latter texts, marriage itself becomes the horrif

In my previous blog, I established Miss Amelia’s café as a place of inclusive community, linked to Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of carnivals and their connection to freak shows. I highlighted that the space engendered a sense of community where its occupants’ grotesque physicality and their subversive genders were accepted. This post explores the grotesque power of patriarchy using Foucauldian theory and its resistance to the collapse of dichotomous gender and sexuality binaries in Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951). Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund, i

In my previous blog, I summarised the plot of McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café and aligned it with key genres and tropes to highlight its Gothicism and cultural critique of patriarchy through grotesque tropes. This post uses Bakhtinian theory to situate Miss Amelia’s café as a place of community, a theatrical space of gender performance and bodily oddities, which temporarily succeeds in challenging patriarchy.   The philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His world (1965) analyses the work of the Renaissance writer François Rabelais to refocu

Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) portrays the destructive power of the patriarchal regime.[1] McCullers’ use of grotesquerie brings the marginalised, the androgynous, the deformed and the weird to the forefront of her novella. In doing so, she makes the abnormal normal and the importance of binary distinctions, such as masculine and feminine, gay and straight, breakdown, at least temporarily. We feel compassion for those traditionally omitted from society and power – particularly, the distinctly masculine Miss Amelia – and we mourn the loss of a fleetingly enjoy

Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic Catherine Spooner New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-4411-5390-6 Reviewed by Donna Mitchell Spooner’s study begins by bringing the reader’s attention to the fact that funny, romantic, and celebratory aspects of the Gothic text have long been ignored. Focusing on the summer of 2012 as a starting point for the rise of post-millennial Gothic’s popularity in terms of its increasing social and cultural omnipresence, she coins the phrase ‘happy Gothic’ as an umbrella term to describe the �

Rereading Stephen King: Navigating the Intertextual Labyrinth Kingston University Saturday 11th November 2017 Keynote Speaker: Simon Brown (Kingston University) In Stephen King’s Gothic (2011) John Sears asserts that rereading King represents ‘an exercise in the extension of repetition, in the act of rereading an oeuvre already deeply structured … by its own engagement in the Gothic habit of rereading … To reread King would be to enter … and perhaps to become lost within, a labyrinth of intra- and intertextual relations, an immense and complex textual space’ (2). Sears’s