Luke Thurston, 2012. Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (Abingdon: Routledge) Luke Thurston’s Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (2012) is a timely addition to the established literature on literary haunting. Throughout, the monograph posits that a host/guest dynamic is central to the function of the ghostly in a selection of short stories and novels from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The antagonistic dynamic that Thurston persuasively argues for is between narratives as hosts - often at first

Digital Nightmares: Wired Ghosts, CCTV Horror and the Found Footage Phenomenon, ed. by Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes The Blair Witch Project (1999) is responsible for sparking a host of handheld horrors that have led to the commercial success of big blockbusters such as [REC] (2007), Paranormal Activity (2007) or Cloverfield (2008) and to the institutionalisation of the ‘found footage’ phenomenon or pseudo-documentary. There has also been a systematic application of new digital media to the recording methods and narrative structures of the horror genre, with films such as My Li

The popularity of gothic and the use of gothic tropes in popular culture is reflected in the ways consumer culture is manipulating the figures of zombies, vampires and ghosts, in particular in the following adverts the commodified image of the zombie and the Japanese female ghost. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgYkhjS2mU8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Ehg746tCw&feature=related

This interview published in The Telegraph may of interest! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bath-childrens-literature/8782207/Roddy-Doyle-interview.html By Martin Chilton Roddy Doyle's recent book of short stories, Bullfighting, captured wonderfully the vaguely comic despair of middle-aged manhood. When I told him I'd enjoyed the book, Doyle replied: "If it's happening, you may as well use it. I just wish more middle-aged men would buy bloody books." There doesn't seem much that Doyle can't let his imagination roam around and transform into beautiful, mo

I am deeply fascinated at the moment by nineteenth-century Gothic sea fiction, particularly its phantoms, wrecks, and derelicts. The long nineteenth-century, as we know, saw tremendous social, industrial, and scientific developments, including the replacement of wooden sailing ships by steel and steam. The ghosts of the Age of Sail still haunted our seas; wooden derelicts trapped in the currents accounted for many a phantom ship sighting, says Margaret Baker, yet by the 1930s, these were all destroyed. These ghosts remain in our literature, and in our film.

Proving the old adage that it’s not what you do but how you do it, Insidious gives the corpse of the American horror film a few invigorating jolts.

Edward Bulwer Lytton is becoming increasingly known within Gothic circles, even though he is still an unjustifiably neglected writer and little known apart from that notorious writing competition ...

‘It seems that ghosts are everywhere these days’, Pilar Blanco and Peeren assert in the introduction to this collection of essays on ghosts, ghostings, haunts and hauntings of the everyday.

Stirling's Department of English Studies  is delighted to welcome one of its newest members of staff, Paula Morris, author of the ghost story Ruined. Paula Morris, a novelist and short story writer of English and Maori descent, was born in New Zealand.  For almost a decade she worked in the record business in London and New York.  Until recently she lived in New Orleans, where she taught creative writing at Tulane University. Paula’s first novel, Queen of Beauty, won best first work of fiction at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.  Hibiscus Coast, a literary thriller set in

Unsurprisingly, in her text about the elusive and multi-layered nature of language in Gothic literature...