As you'll no doubt be aware, today is October the 30th: a date known around the world as All Hallows Eve... Eve. It's when the witches are scrubbing their cauldrons, the vampires are checking their reflections (and swearing a bit), the werewolves are consulting lunar calendars and adjusting their costume accordingly and the giant helmets are being hoisted into the sky on big invisible cranes.
To celebrate, we've chosen All Hallows Eve... Eve as the starting point for a special series of blogs. If Halloween is about the annual influx of the Gothic into popular culture (with costumes, parties, and the odd dodgy cinematic cash-in) then there's no better time to think about the way in which modern popular media itself marks the occasion of Halloween.
So, in the first of a series of blogs, GRG regular and first year PhD student, Mary Going, is going to begin looking at how a classic of modern 'Gothic' television takes up the opportunities offered by the 'Halloween Episode'.
The new academic year is still young, but the Gothic Reading Group is well underway. Our first meeting two weeks ago was a big success, with lots of new and old faces, including students and staff. This Wednesday we meet again for our first text: Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Famous as a re-imagining of the Jane Eyre story, this text invites us to reconsider the convergence of a set of motifs that have become a classic of Victorian Gothic and of post-colonial criticism. This means that our perennial inquiry 'is it Gothic?' can be accompanied by some more nuanced questions: What is it about the Gothic that lends itself to this kind of re-imagining? And how important is the cultural vocabulary of Gothic to a text that sets out to challenge an earlier figuring of 'monstrosity'?
It's also a good read. Here to introduce the text and the session on it is GRG organiser, Carly Stevenson.
The Gothic Reading Group meets this week for its first session of the 2014-15 academic year. This is also the first session under the group's new organisational triumvirate. With that in mind, this preview post does double duty as the new leaders introduce themselves, before taking a quick look at the first text.
Remember - new and old faces are very welcome on Wednesday: do consider coming along if you can make it. We'll be in the Richard Roberts Building, Room A87 from 4pm.
This new academic semester marks the beginning of the Gothic Reading Group's third year. In that time we've gone from being a group of students and faculty with an interest in discussing a range of texts and materials in a friendly and relaxed setting with cake to being. . .
A group of students and faculty with an interest in discussing a range
of texts and materials in a friendly and relaxed setting with cake.
There's exciting news on the way here at the Gothic Reading Group as we ready a new programme of sessions for the 2014-15 academic year. Alongside our meetings, we're also planning a range of other activities that will help bring together Sheffield's community of Gothic scholars.
For now, these are to be kept under a black veil (a black veil concealing a rusted iron chest filled with horrendous puns). However, they will include reaching out to other events and activities at the University and what better way to begin than with our own reflections on a rather important Gothic event that took place in Sheffield last month.
As the Gothic Reading Group gets ready to unveil its schedule for the 2014-15 academic year, along with some exciting plans for the future, now seems like a good time to take a glance back at what we read, where we went and what we said in 2013-14. Admittedly we mostly just went to RRB79 and a surprising amount of what we said seemed to involve Sean Bean as Lovelace or conjecture as to what William Godwin might have thought of things. However. . . we did read rather a lot, from utterly obscure Romantic-era poetry to popular twentieth-century comic book superhero stories. Here then, is Mark's second trip into the Gothic Reading Group's vaults. Bring a candle. Mind the giant helmets. Don't get lost...
Our final Gothic Reading Group session in the current 2013-14 schedule takes place this week. After a journey through various Gothic (and not so Gothic) texts and other materials from the eighteenth-century to the present day, we're finishing by tackling something suitably momentous: Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast 'trilogy.' We'll be focussing on the first installment, Titus Groan, in this session, but it's worthwhile knowing something more about the series as a whole and the life and times of its author. Thankfully, Lauren Nixon is more than happy to share her considerable passion for all things Peake and Gormenghast related. Read on...
