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.

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.

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.

I’ve been thinking about genre lately – about the boundaries of the Gothic genre as a whole and about the ongoing currency of definitions of the ‘female Gothic’ in particular. I have never been especially worried about whether any given text met enough Gothic criteria to ‘count’ as a Gothic novel, but the question of generic definitions is one I’m used to answering. And I have always hated the category of the ‘female Gothic’, for all the usual reasons about its tendency to encourage ahistorical gender essentialism. Overall, I have a strong sense that over-reliance on generic demarcations is confining, but I remain curious as to whether this is countered by the usefulness of such classification.

Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk (1796), was never one to shy away from sensationalism. When the Covent Garden Theatre staged his monodrama The Captive on 22 March 1803, however, even Lewis agreed that he had gone too far. Despite the fact that theatre manager Thomas Harris was willing to stage it again, Lewis withdrew the piece. His letters describe the problem: “when it was about half over a Man fell into convulsions in the Boxes; Presently after a Woman fainted away in the Pit; and when the curtain dropped, two or three more of the spectators went into hysterics..."

I’ve long been a proud gamer. Ever since the 1980s and my family’s first computer, an Amstrad CPC 464 with a green screen monitor, I’ve spent a lot of time growing up (or not) through gaming. Along the way, I’ve somehow also managed to get a doctorate in early modern drama and critical theory but despite that distraction I have also continued my dedication to the videogame. In part owing to the technical applications of Moore’s law (loosely defined as the idea that computer processors will double in complexity every two years) the transformation from the games that defined my initial

The 'post-transitional' Gothic, like all gothic narratives, is animated by tensions occurring within a specific society, at a specific cultural moment. In South Africa these fears arise over the fault lines of global and local; at the seam between the multinational and the post-apartheid nation, where the anxieties of consumer culture – the fears of objectification, of commodification – are experienced as a return of the oppressions which characterise the past.

Fiction written in the wake of the 1994 elections has been collected under the broad title of ‘transitional literature,’ and might further be linked together by a general concern with recent South African history, and, more specifically, with the un-burying of that which it became the purpose of the apartheid government to suppress. The Gothic too is intensely interested in this project of unearthing and constantly presents us with scenarios in which history refuses to remain anterior but resurfaces insistently, disturbing the present

If the original plaasroman presented the South African farm as a wholesome seat of natural order – the heartland of Afrikaner culture where the reign of the white paterfamilias is both just and benign – then Reza de Wet’s short play, while it draws on this pastoral tradition, is at the same time, deeply invested in its disruption. Her 1985 vision of the plaas is not idyllic but nightmarish, and reveals, in both a specific and a general, political sense, a South African institution in ruin

In the first of a semi-regular feature showcasing new authors, horror writer Dave Watson talks about his scariest influence of all: his big brothers' bedroom.  When not playing with the bounds of reality and scribbling down demented creepy tales about monsters, ghosts, beer and stoners, Dave Watson studies at the University of Glasgow and works as a freelance composer and music teacher. He lives in western Scotland with his wife and son. You can download his latest novel In the Devil’s Name from his Amazon author page. Kids hate brushing their teeth. It tastes weird, no matter