Terry Pratchett Symposium, Dublin City University, 28 May 2016

Posted on 13th May 2016 by William the Bloody

The CFP for this symposium on Terry Pratchett has closed now–I’m not sure whether we saw it and posted it. But it still looks to be a brilliant event and well worth attending.

Posted in Conferences, Events | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Wicked Lady Rides Again

Posted on 13th May 2016 by Sam George

download

If you are a fan of wicked ladies (who isn’t) you won’t want to miss my colleague Dr Rowland Hughes  talking about Hertfordshire legend Lady Skelton who transformed into a real life highwaywoman!! She is the dark lady that inspired the 1945 film starring a cross dressing, cloaked and smouldering  Margaret Lockwood: 

The Wicked Lady Pub is a local feature in Hertfordshire it offers a fine menu and keeps the legend alive by honouring this wonderfully folkloric female rogue.

The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton by Magdalen King-Hall was first published in 1944 and has been reissued by University of Hertfordshire Press in a special edition edited with notes and a critical introduction by Rowland Hughes (priced 8.99).

Get ready to stand and deliver and catch up with Rowland at related events and talks listed on the university event pages here

I am really looking forward to this …wicked!!

 

Posted in Events, Film Clips, Publications, Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Contemporary Gothic Study Day, Lancaster University, 20 May 2016

Posted on 11th May 2016 by William the Bloody

This looks like a brilliant day on contemporary Gothic at Lancaster University, organised by Catherine Spooner’s Gothic scholars and featuring Emma McEvoy (University of Westminster) and the award-winning novelist Andrew Michael Hurley. In addition, there are papers on a wide range of themes, from folk Gothic and werewolves to the modernity of J G Ballard. Catherine has long been a valued contributor to the OGOM Project, and Lancaster does some wonderful research in the field.

Posted in Events | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

OGOM Newsletter May 2016

Posted on 11th May 2016 by William the Bloody

Dear OGOM followers,

We hope you’re all well. We have quite a few news items. First of all, OGOM’s first book, ‘Open Graves, Open Minds’: Representations of the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present, will be out in paperback from Manchester University Press at a very reasonable price from 1 June 2016. It’s £15.99, so a very affordable book for students and could be adopted for courses.

paperbackWe’re also making good progress on the second book and the journal special issue which have been inspired by the fabulous Company of Wolves conference in September.

In addition, we’ve made a few changes to the Open Graves, Open Minds website.

First of all, we’ve been working on how to make both the appearance more attractive and the site more navigable—hope you like it. The Welcome page has a scrolling news feed which we can use to alert you to any important events.

We’re improving the ways we keep in touch with you about the OGOM Project. If you’re following us through the Facebook group or via Twitter, we’d like to encourage you to visit the blog and the other pages of the website at:

www.opengravesopenminds.com

You can subscribe to the website from the form at the bottom of the Welcome page and at the left-hand side of the blog; this is an excellent way of receiving updates by email. The blog holds original research posts, CFPS, reviews of conferences, exhibitions, publications, and so on; and news of OGOM’s Undead Studies programmes at BA, MA, and PhD level.

If you like to follow updates using RSS in your browser, we have links to enable that, too—just click on the orange icons.

Conversely, if you’re not aware of our social media presence, we have a Facebook group and a Twitter stream. The Facebook Open Minds, Open Graves group is here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1231153610302396/

Our Twitter account is @OGOMProject. Many of you have been following us individually on Sam’s, Bill’s, or Kaja’s accounts. We try and retweet from these but very soon the blog will only automatically send alerts via @OGOMProject—so please, please follow us on that account!

We value your contributions a great deal and so we’re trying to find ways in which we can cultivate lively discussions. We’re looking at discussion software and ways to integrate the Facebook responses with the blog. We’re also thinking of inviting guest bloggers to contribute. If you have any suggestions about these ideas (or comments in general), please do send us feedback.

Finally, exciting events are being planned. In 2017, OGOM is (tentatively) due to become a properly instituted research centre with an international focus. There is also the Books of Blood exhibition which will be launched in Limerick in autumn 2017 and will be touring around the UK. This will feature original artwork and performances, and objects on the history of blood from the Wellcome archives,

And we are drafting the CFP for the next OGOM conference. It’s all very dark and secret at the moment, but be prepared to think of witches and magic. This will be posted on the website very soon.

Best wishes,

Sam, Bill, and Kaja

Posted in OGOM News | 2 Comments

Angela Carter

Posted on 8th May 2016 by William the Bloody

I’m a day late, but this is to honour the birthday of one of the most important twentieth-century English writers. Angela Carter (whose official website is here) drew on folkloric, fairy tale, and Gothic themes in her gloriously baroque explorations of desire and identity. I’m currently working on a conference paper, ‘”The price of flesh is love”: Commodification, corporeality, and paranormal romance in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber’, for the University of Cardiff’s Fantasies of Contemporary Culture conference. This will be the basis of a chapter in OGOM’s forthcoming Company of Wolves book, based on our own fabulous Company of Wolves conference last September where, among many other papers that touched tangentially on Carter’s concerns, Sir Christopher Frayling gave a brilliant and moving talk on Carter, with whom he had a deep friendship.

Posted in Critical thoughts | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Vampire Radio

Posted on 8th May 2016 by William the Bloody

Stuart Maconie has a whole show devoted to vampire-themed music today on BBC 6 Music!

I’ve not listened to it yet, but it’s available for the next 29 days.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079vhq9

Posted in Fun stuff | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Witches in Contemporary Culture

Posted on 7th May 2016 by William the Bloody

We’ve been pursuing witch related themes for a while now; I think this is becoming a central line of research for OGOM. This is a very interesting essay by Moze Halperin on the power of contemporary witch narratives, such as Dave Eggar’s recent, marvellous film, The Witch. I find the connections to feminism and radical Islam overdone in parts, but it’s worth reading.

Posted in Critical thoughts | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Arabian Nights Vol 1: The Restless One review

Posted on 7th May 2016 by William the Bloody

From Peter Bradshaw’s enthusiastic review here, and others elsewhere, this looks to be a brilliant film. Miguel Gomes’s film shows contemporary Portuguese life obliquely through the framed tale structure of The Thousand and One Nights. The Nights is another of those ur-texts whose influence, both in form and content, spreads widely throughout the literature of the fantastic.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Jane Eyre’s Fantastic Origins

Posted on 7th May 2016 by William the Bloody

More on Jane Eyre (it is, after all, the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth) and its complex intertextual relationships with other texts and genres (following my post below).

Here, Emma Butcher traces the novel’s origins in Brontë’s (and her siblings’) own literature of the fantastic–her youthful tales of the brooding heroes and sighing heroines of the imaginary topography of Verdopolis and Angria.

Thus, one of the most powerful Victorian novels of psychological realism is rooted in the fantasy genre; in turn, it becomes a crucial source for romantic fiction and then paranormal romance. It was also a model for other adaptations in other genres, notably Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, but also the zombie film I Walked with a Zombie (fitting in nicely with another of OGOM’s interests).

This intermodulation of genres–the process Genette calls ‘architextuality’–fascinates me. Sarah Bartlett and I attempted a provisional graphing of these relationships in an article here, which explored the idea of representing these relationships digitally.

Posted in Critical thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jane Eyre–a YA novel?

Posted on 7th May 2016 by William the Bloody

A provocative article by the YA author Lena Coakley, claiming Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel of autonomy, education, and desire as a YA novel. This challenges ideas of the canon and of genre, of course, and does have a certain validity, I feel. Her themes are very much those of YA fiction and Jane Eyre shares a readership with those novels. There are fascinating intertextual relationships between Jane Eyre and many YA novels–particularly the paranormal romances that OGOM has explored. Brontë’s novel not only supplies the plot structure of many paranormal romances (as does her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights), it can be seen as one of the architexts (in Gérard Genette’s terminology) of this new genre; it’s a text, in other words, that serves as the basis for a whole class of generically related works.

And yet–without disparaging the high literary quality of many YA novels–I would argue that Jane Eyre surpasses them, partially by escaping the constraints that genre fictions have imposed on them by commercial necessity. But there is a huge discussion to be had here . . .

Posted in Critical thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment