Focusing on nineteenth-century Calcutta as the literal and imagined literary space where the urban and suburban imaginaries collide, I hold Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Monihara’ [‘The Lost Jewels’, 1898] to be the first, concerted effort in pushing the urban Gothic well beyond the limits of the city. The cinematic adaptation of the same directed by Satyajit Ray [1961] will also fall within its purview. Delineating a space that is both material and metaphysical, the urban Gothic’s beating heart is often seen to reside in abandoned dwellings, calling forth an inspection into the private chambers and economies of vacant spaces, the birth of the modern subject, and the vagaries of capital.

Read Homebound: City and the Spectre of Accumulation in Tagore’s ‘Monihara’

  Dublin is a city with a densely layered history. A site of collective habitation since the fourth century, the city is marked by successive waves of settlement and violence. As a result, Dublin has a rich material and cultural history, populated with iconic landmarks, historic buildings, and a host of urban legends. As a modern tourist destination, Dublin leverages this history in service of attracting visitors from around the world, promoting the city’s complex past and, in particular, its Gothic antecedents. In October 2012, Dublin City Council in partnership with Fáilte Ireland (the Irish tourism board) held the first of what was to become the annual Bram Stoker Festival. Each year the festival coincides with Hallowe’en – which originates from the Irish pagan festival of Samhain – and celebrates Stoker’s most well-known work, Dracula (1897). Since the original festival to commemorate one hundred years since Stoker’s death, the event has expanded to become a celebration of Dublin as a supernatural city. This is despite the fact that Dracula is not set in Ireland and is devoid of any Irish characters. However, the novel has long been interpreted as a parable for the Irish sectarian and class wars of the late nineteenth century. Given that Stoker was a native Dubliner, the novel has been reclaimed as a story with an Irish subtext, and Dublin as the home of the Vampire. This paper will chart the evolution of the Bram Stoker Festival and the concomitant reimaging of Dublin as a supernatural city over the past decade. The paper will consider the cult of Stoker and how, despite having only one work of merit, Stoker continues to be the most well-known Irish Gothic writer of all time. The paper will also examine how the festival has managed to expand from its original remit of Stoker and Dracula to a broader promotion of Dublin as a profoundly haunted city, one that now operates as a unique selling point for attracting tourists.

Read Reclaiming Gothic Dublin: Tourism and the Cult of Stoker

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983; 1998) has been praised as a novella demonstrating a “gradual development of exquisite suspense” and distinguishing, in its subtlety, “the true ghost story” (Bann cited in Scullion, 2003: 296). This article examines James Watkins’ 2012 film adaptation with particular focus on representations of the complex relationship between death and screen, which will be addressed through a close reading of the novella alongside its filmic adaptation. Both Hill’s (1983) novella and Watkins’ (2012) adaptation are littered with representations of trauma, death, and the experience of dying, predominantly by women and children, who functioned on the outskirts of Victorian society and whose existence remained largely confined to the margins. As such, this article serves to establish how the film adaptation upholds the Gothic through the representations of trauma, death, and dying in relation to Hill’s (1983) novella with particular focus on the supernatural spectral haunting of Jennet Humfrye and the death that surrounds her at every turn. In terms of Watkins’ (2012) film adaptation, my discussion will focus on those previously oversimplified representations of gender to demonstrate Watkins’ critical commentary on the marginality of female trauma.

Read Adapting representations of death from page to screen in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983)

This article explores thanatological themes in the CW drama Riverdale with attention to how the series employs death and its signifiers to construct a metaphor for patriarchal violence and its traumatic imprints. Focusing on three central female characters, it considers how Riverdale explores patriarchal violence and the trauma it produces both at the level of narrative and through experimentation with Gothic trappings, generic conventions, aesthetic sensibilities, non-diegetic effects, and allusions to other narratives of patriarchal violence. This analysis underscores how Riverdale discloses and navigates one of trauma's central paradoxes: the impossibility and the imperative of its representation. It considers also how the female body in Riverdale acts as a vehicle of resistance: a site where patriarchal violence is inscribed but might also be mobilized toward alternative forms of identity negotiation and interconnection, and toward arousing in the audience a desire to participate in the radical work of participatory witnessing.

Read ‘At Its Heart, a Haunted Town’: Patriarchal Violence, Female Resistance, and Post-Trauma in Riverdale

Videogames may rely on the highly logical nature of computing technology, but that does not mean they are immune to the dark touch of Gothic; far from it. Gothic themes, characters, stories, and environments can be found across a wide range of videogames, from puzzle games to multiplayer online games and from shoot ‘em ups to strategy games. More wide-ranging and focused work is certainly required as there is a major lack of sustained scholarly engagement with Gothic in videogames.[1] In an effort to begin the task of remedying this and as part of a more extensive project (a book entitled 'Gothic Games' [forthcoming]), this paper plots some initial coordinates of the domain, locating some of its major features, and provides a framework for evaluating the uses of Gothic in games. The foundation on which this analysis rests is an amalgam of two materials. The first is comprised of concepts, models and ideas that have been developed specifically for the analysis of videogames within what has become known as Game Studies. The second is drawn from concepts, models and ideas developed for the analysis of Gothic within what has become known as Gothic Studies. Game and Gothic Studies are both based in the Humanities and share through the lens of Cultural Studies a common attentiveness to the formation and reception of certain types of texts and their “meaning potential”; laden with signification and organized around patterns, texts both carry and are constitutive of culture. As Mikko Lehtonen puts it, “texts are not stuck on top of the rest of the world, as messages detachable from it, but participate in a central way in the making of reality as well as forming our image of it”(2000, 11). Gothic Studies evaluates texts, the way they are used and engaged with across a range of media and cultural practices. Game Studies focuses specifically on the formal specificities of games and the way they are played and engaged with. This paper calls on material from both provinces to fulfil its primary aim of understanding the effect that videogame media have on the appearance of Gothic in games and to stage its argument that videogame media has the capability to produce a powerful and compelling addition to Gothic fiction’s arsenal of affect. [1] While there is work focused specifically on horror games, such as Perron's collection Horror Video Games (2009), there is no book or edited collection on the topic of Gothic in games. The author has however written several articles on the Gothic in games including entries in Blackwell Guides to the Gothic.

Read The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates in Videogames