“Farewell Miss Julie Logan: A Wintry Tale”, by J.M. Barrie
Written in diary form & telling of an uncanny romance in a remote winter glen, “Farewell Miss Julie Logan” evokes J.M. Barrie’s fascination with longing, death & loss in one of the most unnerving & tenacious examples of #Gothic fiction ever to come from #Scotland
Listen to the story online, courtesy of Romancing the Gothic:
“In story after story, epicene young men, difficult children, or wild beasts set out to shake up the stifling complacency around them.”
Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) – Saki – was born #OTD, 18 Dec, in Akyab (now Sittwe), in Myanmar. Although born in the Raj & raised in England, his parents were Scots & he considered himself to be Scottish, too. Fatema Ahmed looks at his fierce, funny, & wicked fiction
Saki’s “Tobermory”, “The Boar-Pig”, “The Lumber Room”, & many others are hilarious (as is “Esmé”, if you don’t mind all the blood…). But his horrifying winter tale “The Interlopers” is a work of #Gothic art, worthy of the tradition of James Hogg & #RobertLouisStevenson
cfp: DEVILS & JUSTIFIED SINNERS
24–25 Aug 2024
An online conference from Romancing the Gothic to mark the 200th anniversary of James Hogg’s THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS & CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER – seeking papers on
The #Scottish writer published five #gothic romance novels by the early 1800s but never put her #poetry in print. In 1919, excerpts of her poetry appeared in a newspaper, but the source of these poems – a notebook she presented to a family friend – disappeared. Now Craik’s poetry manuscript has been found & published by two @uofsc faculty members
Gothic Warnings: Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray, Dracula, & the Anthropocene
29 Nov, University of Aberdeen, & online. Free
Dr Emily Alder reconsiders these famous #Gothic works in light of the #Anthropocene, a concept used to describe the impact of human activities on Earth systems & in which the #Victorian period is deeply implicated
New!
POEMS BY A LADY
by Helen Craik
Ed. by Rachel Mann & Patrick Scott
The #poetry of Helen Craik (1751–1825), #Gothic novelist & friend of #RobertBurns, was long thought lost. The rediscovery of her 1790 #manuscript “Poems by a Lady”, transcribed here for the first time, invites a fresh evaluation of her life & work, & adds to the critical reassessment of poetry by #Scottish women in the #Romantic era
“My interest was sparked by the circumstances – the discovery of a manuscript that had long been thought lost. Add to that the very questionable rumours surrounding Craik’s abrupt departure from Arbigland, and you’ve got yourself a plot that seems to jump out of the pages of academic fiction.”
—Rachel Mann & Patrick Scott discuss their co-edited edition of Helen Craik’s POEMS BY A LADY
TW/CW: there is sexual assault in this very old Malay movie. I'm drawing comparisons between the descent into abjection in the protagonist here and Lewis's The Monk.
ps: I will likely surface to post deets on two more events: one a creative writing workshop exploring spatiality and the hypertext with Dr. Darin Bradley, Dr Ewan Awang and Dr Fadhli Kaidhzir as guest speakers (I'll be doing the hypertext fiction workshop part), and the second one my second Memory Studies in Literature and the Humanities webinar.
“They were both experienced in such affairs, and powerful with the spade; and they had scarce been twenty minutes at their task before they were rewarded by a dull rattle on the coffin lid.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body-Snatcher”, read by Sir Christopher Lee
Ruth Richardson writes in The Lancet on how Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body-Snatcher” shows the author’s
“acute analysis of degrees of guilt; the complicit socialisation of maleness; the hypocrisies which so often lie behind worldly success; the damage behind apparent failure; the dark silences that can exist in social relations that pass as bonhomie”
Author James Kelman joins the Unburied Books Podcast to discuss James Hogg’s THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS & CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER, originally published in 1824.
The podcast discusses the novel’s unusual structure, moral ambiguity, & mixture of genres. Kelman offers historical insight into the book’s philosophy & places the work in a modern, international context.
free ebook:
THE DEVIL I AM SURE – three short stories by James Hogg
In these three stories – “Mary Burnet”, “The Brownie of the Black Haggs”, & “Strange Letter of a Lunatic” – James Hogg (1770–1835) demonstrates his mastery of the craft of storytelling, & his understanding of the quirks, possibilities, & dark undercurrents of human psychology
We have The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and maybe The Tell-Tale Heart all ready to read to you live over at https://www.twitch.tv/chilliteracy
Make yourself cosy and warm, then come over to be chilled!
When you're beyond dead tired but then are gently reminded by the very patient convener that your Folk Horror x Material Culture talk for a British uni* is going to go up on eventbrite soon, so you hammer out an abstract and are suddenly taken aback at your own cleverness.
gently pats self on the back
I'm actually utterly excited for this talk (eventbrite?! omg) but also really tired. Haha.
*edited because I've been such an over-extended/overworked airhead that I somehow had the misapprehension that it was an American uni!
cfp: DEVILS & JUSTIFIED SINNERS
24–25 Aug 2024
An online conference from Romancing the Gothic to mark the 200th anniversary of James Hogg’s THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS & CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER – seeking papers on
In honor the UK’s #NationalPoetryDay, here’s the UK Amazon link to Into That Darkness Peering, a #gothic#horror collection featuring my #poetry and @MarikaBrousiano’s illustrations.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel POOR THINGS (1992) has won the Golden Lion at the 2023 La Biennale di Venezia. In a series of recordings made in the last year of his life, Gray talks about the novel & reads extracts – & discusses works which influenced him, from Thomas Love Peacock’s NIGHTMARE ABBEY (1818) to Mel Brooks’ YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)
#CfP für die #Tagung "#Gothic (Revival) Spaces: Konzepte und Interpretationen Britischer und kontinentaler Wohnarchitektur zwischen 1750 und 1900", die vom 14. bis 16. November 2024 an der Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg (#Uni_WUE) stattfinden wird.