Category Archives: Critical thoughts

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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Maria Tatar

Posted on 14th May 2016 by William the Bloody

Maria Tatar is John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Harvard University and an expert on children’s literature, German literature, and folklore. She is editor of the Norton Classic Fairy Tales. She coedited (with Erika Eichenseer) the … Continue reading →

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YA Fiction and Style

Posted on 14th May 2016 by William the Bloody

Too many YA novels, more so, I suspect, in the very commercial realm of paranormal romance, are let down by their style–even among the most interesting and complex ones. Too often, these fictions are narrated in the first person and … Continue reading →

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Gargoyle Romance and Capture Fantasy

Posted on 13th May 2016 by William the Bloody

The world of paranormal romance is wide and strange and generically multifarious. Human beings engage erotically with almost every monster the psyche has conjured up, even those where consummation seems somewhat impractical–ghosts, mermen, and zombies, for example. Some of the … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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, … Continue reading →

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Vampire Zombies Run Amok in the Big Apple

Posted on 2nd May 2016 by Sam George

One of my PhD students Jillian has been writing on The Strain. For those of you who are not familiar with it The Strain is a 2009 vampire novel by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. It is the first … Continue reading →

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Disco and Dystopia

Posted on 2nd May 2016 by William the Bloody

With regard to Sam’s remarks on my previous post of a disco Walpurgisnacht, where we saw disco music as antithetical to Gothic, I was just reminded of this. It’s a dystopian Dr Moreau-like fantasy of science going wrong and mutating … Continue reading →

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