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I Waked One Morning From a Dream: What Is Gothic Literature?

There have been many nights when I’ve laid awake wondering: What makes a book Gothic? Who decides what is and isn’t Gothic fiction? And why, why, why do I keep reading them?

It’s time to reveal the truth about Gothic literature. Together, we’ll unravel the fragments, falsehoods and frame narratives to separate fact from fiction. Interrogate Gothic literature’s most renowned writers – including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. And find out why this obscure, 200-year-old genre is still haunting us today.

#18thCentury #19thCentury #20thCentury #AnnRadcliffe #AnneRice #BramStoker #Falsehood #Fragment #FrameNarrative #HoraceWalpole #MarkZDanielewski #MaryShelley #MatthewLewis #MaxBrooks #ShirleyJackson #StephenKing

gothicdispatch.com/what-is-got

Continued thread

This quote felt particularly poignant:

"It is a strange fact, but incontestible, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men's minds, than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause. — The Last Man, Chapter 25"

Finished "The Last Man" by Mary Shelley. A beautiful, if somewhat dense and long-winded, story about the slow death of humanity due to a plague. Published in 1826 but set in the 2090s, Shelley probably couldn't have possibly imagined what the 21st century would actually look like, but it's clear that not much has changed in terms of human behavior despite our technological advancement.

2024 Wrap-Up: Podcasts

Thanks to all of the #podcasts that invited me on this year!

My "Looking Back on Genre History" #ScienceFiction segment ran each month on #StarShipSofa.

I talked to #Potterversity about my book chapter "Dark Arts & Secret Histories: Investigating #DarkAcademia"; to #TrashCompactor & #NewBooksNetwork about my book #StarWars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away; & to #NewBooksNetwork about my book #StarTrek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier.

I also talked #Tocqueville with the #VitalRemnants podcast & #MaryShelley twice with #TheMcConnellCenter podcast.

Links to all of these: amyhsturgis.com/?page_id=9

2024 Wrap-Up: Talks

Some of my talks from this year are available online.

* Why You Should Read #TheLastMan by #MaryShelley
Link: youtu.be/_k9pH0dNPVg

* Why You Should Read #Frankenstein by #MaryShelley
Link: youtu.be/19gOThR5dZw

* A Fortnight in the Wilderness with #Tocqueville
Link: youtu.be/OaT-17hgAFU

* “Missing Students & Their Fictional Afterlives: #TrueCrime, #CrimeFiction, & #DarkAcademia" (given at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining #Crime in #PopularCulture” conference)
Link: dropbox.com/scl/fi/q221yilebjo

#SFF #ScienceFiction #History #Literature #19thCentury #IntellectualHistory #Books

A wonderful book list here, starting with a favorite of mine, #TheLastMan by #MaryShelley. I’ve had the privilege of teaching six of these novels in class. Recommended!

From #plague to planetary crisis: #ClimateFiction before #CliFi | The BMJ
#SFF #ScienceFiction #Climate

bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q2583

The BMJ · From plague to planetary crisis: climate fiction before cli-fiLiterature has long sounded ecological alarms and imagined our planetary futures, finds Lakshmi Krishnan Our oldest stories begin in the soil or by the sea, myth being the original ecological narrative. The Mandé and Sumerians tell of people growing from seeds or moulded from earth; Rigveda, the ancient Hindu sacred text, and the Kojiki, the earliest written Japanese chronicle, speak of births from primordial oceans; and Abrahamic traditions place us in Eden’s lushness. With industrialisation came a new imperative: writers began exploring not just our connection to nature but also our power to destroy it. Climate fiction is a recent literary genre confronting environmental and societal breakdown. But literature has grappled with the interplay of people and environment long before “cli-fi” exploded in the 2010s. These works offer more than historical perspective. They reveal how story and imagination might help us grasp what climate data alone cannot—the full scope of our crisis—while helping us to envision paths beyond catastrophe. Lionel Verney is the sole survivor of a global plague in a 21st century Europe torn asunder by political upheaval, societal collapse, and environmental catastrophe. Shelley is better known for Frankenstein (1818); Last Man pushes those Gothic scientific horrors further, to humanity’s extinction. Written after Mount Tambora erupted in today’s Indonesia, causing a volcanic winter that lasted over two years, and reflecting Shelley’s personal tragedy, this prophecy about human spirit in the face of disaster influenced a flock of apocalyptic subgenres: the trope of a lonely human roaming the planet after a “die-off” endures. Read it for the clarity of Shelley’s vision and her evocative prose: memorably, in Verney’s encounter with a sheepdog still guarding its dead shepherd’s flock—crystallising nature’s persistence against our impermanence and suggesting the …