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.

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.

Visions of Egypt: Literature and Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Present An International and Interdisciplinary Conference 6-7 September 2013 Venues: History Centre, Hull (6 September), University of Hull (7 September) Keynote Speakers: Dr Sahar El Mougy, Cairo University Dr Joann Fletcher and Dr Stephen Buckley, University of York (to be confirmed) Professor William Hughes, Bath Spa University Professor Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck, University of London Professor Susan Pearce, University  of Leicester In Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) an

The 18th-Century Gothick Symposium: 7 August 2013, University of Oxford The Gothick Revival in eighteenth-century Britain is a multi-faceted phenomenon, simultaneously liminal and mainstream, historical and modern, whimsical and serious. This one-day symposium seeks to explore the revival’s many dimensions. Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers that address any aspect of the revival, and may include: art architecture interiors furniture antiquarianism history literature medievalism patronage politics restoration sexuality Please email 250-word propos