The next instalment in Sheffield Gothic's series of profile blogs focuses on Angela Wright, co-director of the Centre for the History of the Gothic at the University of Sheffield, as she explores her interest in the Gothic, her favourite Gothic text, and who she would like to invite to dinner!
Angela Wright, Professor of Romantic
Literature in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, former
Co-President of the IGA (2013-17) specialising in Gothic poetry and prose of
the Romantic period.
Major publications include: Britain, France and the Gothic,
1764-1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013) which was
shortlisted for the Allan Lloyd Smith memorial prize; with Dale Townshend, Ann
Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2014), with
Dale Townshend, Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (EUP, 2015); Mary
Shelley (University of Wales Press, 2018). I am currently working with
Catherine Spooner and Dale Townshend upon a major 3 volume Cambridge History of
the Gothic, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, upon an
edition of the works of Ann Radcliffe with Michael Gamer, and a further monograph 'Fostering Romanticism'.
What do you Research:
I specialise in Gothic literature of the Romantic period,
and write upon both canonical and non-canonical authors of that period. So, for
example, I have written books, chapters and essays upon well-recognised authors
of the Gothic, such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary
Shelley, but I have also written upon less well-celebrated works, such as the
'Northanger Novels' that Jane Austen's Catherine Moreland read so excitedly in
her Northanger Abbey, particularly those by Regina Maria Roche and
Eleanor Sleath, the early Gothic novels of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
lesser-known Gothic works upon the Catholic Inquisition for an essay in a
collection called Spain and British Romanticism, eds. Ian
Haywood and Diego Saglia. There are hundreds of Gothic works during the
Romantic period that we don't talk about or read, and not all of them are
merely 'poor imitations' of the works of Radcliffe and Lewis. So I think that
there is still a huge amount of excavation and research work to be
carried out in this period.
How did you become interested in the Gothic?
I became interested in the Gothic as an early teenager.
I'd scare myself by reading too many ghost stories and walking home past the
local graveyard. From these early fears and frissons, I looked for ways in
which to account for my fears, and that led me to the Gothic genre. I took my
first degree in English and French at the University of Stirling, and studied a
great module with David Punter called 'Ghosts and Terrors', and then a PhD upon
the Gothic novel and drama in Britain and France at the University of Aberdeen.
My dual interest in the literatures of Britain and France led to the 2013 book
'The Import of Terror', which examined the issues of translation and imitation
in the Gothic traditions in both Britain and France, and how these forms of
reciprocity undercut and belied the military hostilities between the two
nations in the long eighteenth century. With its testing of the borders between
subject and object, self and other, the Gothic became the perfect vehicle by
which authors could work against the cultural hostilities evinced by their
nations. This is still working today!
I have a confession to make: I cannot watch Gothic horror
movies which involve blood and gore without passing out, and so do not venture
much into contemporary Gothic horror films. But of course I would recommend
reading anything by Ann Radcliffe, particularly The Romance of the Forest,
The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, anything
at all by Mary Shelley (and definitely not just Frankenstein). For more
contemporary iterations of the Gothic, I love the films of Guillermo del Toro,
particularly Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water; Elizabeth Kostova's The
Historian and the fiction of Patrick McGrath.
Who Would you invite to dinner?
Dead? Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, to see if they
could resolve their aesthetic differences. Alive? Guillermo del Toro.
Addendum: I'd also invite John Polidori, Mary Shelley and Robert Smith to dinner. I want Polidori and Mary to clear up disagreements on what was and was not read at the Villa Diodati in 1816. Robert Smith from The Cure would sing divinely.
Addendum: I'd also invite John Polidori, Mary Shelley and Robert Smith to dinner. I want Polidori and Mary to clear up disagreements on what was and was not read at the Villa Diodati in 1816. Robert Smith from The Cure would sing divinely.
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