Category Archives: Critical thoughts

Another set of Top Ten Shapeshifters (Part 1)

Posted on 4th June 2016 by William the Bloody

It’s taken me a while to respond to Kaja and Sam’s excellent lists of their top ten shapeshifters (here and here). Here are the first five of my own favourites (not in order of importance). 1. Circe, in Homer, Odyssey … Continue reading →

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Fantasy and dystopia in the Middle East

Posted on 4th June 2016 by William the Bloody

It hardly needs saying that fantastic literature, especially in its dystopian mode, is frequently written as political critique. It is potent way of writing against oppression especially under extremely authoritarian and censorial regimes. This is an excellent essay by Alexandra … Continue reading →

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Marina Warner, ‘Angela Carter: fairy tales, cross-dressing and the mercurial slipperiness of identity’

Posted on 4th June 2016 by William the Bloody

Always fascinating, Marina Warner explores the themes of metamorphosis and identity, fairy tales and cross-dressing in the works of Angela Carter, drawing on the archives at the British Library. Angela Carter, as we have said before, is a writer central … Continue reading →

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British Gothic: Penny Dreadful

Posted on 1st June 2016 by Sam George

Critical Survey is edited by Bryan Loughery and Graham Holderness of the University of Hertfordshire. The journal currently has a very interesting special issue out entitled ‘British Gothic: Penny Dreadful’ (Vol 28. Issue 1, 2016). A list of the essays is … Continue reading →

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Stacey Abbott on iZombie

Posted on 31st May 2016 by William the Bloody

The rise of the sympathetic monster has been a unifying theme of OGOM’s research. Of all the monsters to feature in paranormal romance and similar narratives that humanise the undead and the monstrous, the zombie is surely one of the … Continue reading →

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Top Ten Shapeshifters – The Retro Version

Posted on 27th May 2016 by Sam George

In response to The Guardian’s Top Ten Shapeshifters in Fiction (which is very noughties) and Kaja’s lively alternative list, I am posting my own top ten which is a little bit more retro! A shapeshifter is usually understood to be … Continue reading →

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Vampire Politics meets the EU

Posted on 24th May 2016 by firekrank

This article ‘Transylvania joining EU could see one million vampires in UK by 2020’ was published on the satirical news site NewsThump. Adding a Gothic twist to Brexit, it exaggerates fears regarding national identity by suggesting that by remaining in … Continue reading →

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On Twilight, dangerous love, romantic poetry and voyeurism

Posted on 19th May 2016 by firekrank

The following blog post, ‘Love is Dangerous’, appeared on my Facebook news feed. I read it and the post which it is reacting to (which you can read here) with interest. Whilst the original post on ‘What Happens Next: A … Continue reading →

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Why I believe in the story of ‘Old Stinker’ the Hull Werewolf

Posted on 18th May 2016 by Sam George

Sabine Baring-Gould claims that ‘English folklore is singularly barren of werewolf stories , the reason being that wolves had been extirpated from England under the Anglo Saxon kings, and therefore ceased to be the object of dread to the people’ … Continue reading →

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Beauty and the Beast: A modernist transformation by Clarice Lispector

Posted on 16th May 2016 by William the Bloody

‘Beauty and the Beast’ seems to me to be a rather important fairy tale. It’s the architext of paranormal romance, the story whose narrative form and themes lies at the heart of all those romantic encounters between human and other, … Continue reading →

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