Some spookily exciting events coming up soon for Hallowe’en (and afterwards too):
1. North West Long Nineteenth-Century Seminar series, hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University (on line), 3 November 2021, 16:30 – 19:00 GMT.
OGOM’s Dr Sam George will be talking again on The Black Vampyre (the topic of a very successful online event for Being Human). Sam is accompanied by Charlotte Chassefière (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier), on ‘Confinement and Masquerade: Charlotte Dacre and the Gothic body’; and Rebecca Gibson (University of Lancaster) ‘[T]he Corruption Implicit’: Liminal Faces and Ambiguous Moralities In Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Gothic’.
This Halloween seminar will focus on Gothic bodies from the Romantic period to the early twentieth century. Three speakers will consider the resonances of the Gothic body in terms of race and gender, examining themes of monstrosity, confinement, facial transformation and masquerade.
2. Gothic Programme at Chawton House: When nature strikes back. A series of displays, tours, online talks, and other events till 31 October 2021.
From Frankenstein’s monster to The Day of the Triffids; Ann Radcliffe’s wildly sublime literary landscapes to the environmental apocalypse of films such as The Day After Tomorrow; from eighteenth-century Gothic to its modern sci-fi descendants, we have always been preoccupied with the effects of the natural world on humankind – when nature strikes back. As Autumn draws in, join us for dark folklore, plants and plagues: Gothic tours and talks, a new garden trail, atmospheric dining, and a movie night that’ll put a spell on you.
3. Visit Lud-in-the-Mist for Halloween, plus Lolly Willowes. BBC Radio 4, 30 October 2021.
Dramatisations of two brilliant novels (I gave a paper on Lud-in-the-Mist at our Gothic Faerie conference).
Doctor Who writer Joy Wilkinson has adapted the groundbreaking fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist into a play for BBC Radio Drama, which airs in October.
The novel by Hope Mirrlees was published in 1926 and is considered a pioneer of the fantasy genre that is all too often overlooked. Wilkinson aims to put that right – with the help of one of the book’s greatest advocates, Neil Gaiman, who has a star cameo in the production. [. . .] in a Halloween double-bill with Lolly Willowes a feminist classic with fantasy elements by Sylvia Townsend Warner, adapted by Sarah Daniels. Both dramas will be available on iPlayer following the broadcast.
4. Irish Women, Bodies, and the Gothic Tradition, BARS Digital Events (on line), 9 December 2021, 17:00 – 18:30 GMT
In Irish literature from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Gothic tradition has been shaped by the spectrality and the perceived vulnerability of the female body. [. . .] This roundtable will consider the paradoxical role of women and feminized others in the long tradition of the Irish Gothic.
5. Young People and YA Fiction in the Time of Covid-19, Dr Alison Waller, Centre for Childhood Cultures, Queen Mary University of London, 28 October 2021, 17:00 – 19:30 BST
Researchers have argued that reading has provided ‘refuge’ for young people during the Covid-19 pandemic (Clark & Picton 2020), but there are still concerns about adolescent mental health following this period of disruption to ‘normal’ life. There are signs that the crisis is in retreat in the UK, but the future is uncertain. In this talk, I will discuss my British Academy-funded ‘Reading for Normal’ project, which offered enthusiastic teen readers a temporary community for talking about their own lives in relation to YA fiction during a period of lockdown.
6. Ragged, livid & on fire: The Wanderings of Melmoth at 200 – Symposium, Marsh’s Library, Dublin, 29 October 2021, 09:30 – 18:00 IST
A day of events to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Charles Robert Maturin’s infamous gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer
