Do you like ghosts, goblins, and all things gothic? What about horses, horse-riding and all things equestrian? What happens if you put both of those things together? Heads will roll…
On Thursday the 5th March I will be talking about the evolution of the dark, demonic, ghostly horse and rider (yes, the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow fame, along with his ancestors and descendants!) as the first speaker in the Macquarie University Department of English’s 2020 Research Seminar Series. (more…)
I’m very excited to share the newly released collection of essays entitled Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out, edited by Ruth Heholt and Melissa Edmundson, and published by Palgrave MacMillan (with gorgeous design and quality production work). Brimming with excellent new scholarship on the creepiest manifestations of animals in gothic fiction, from rats and cats to spiders and snails, this volume charts new territory in bringing together the fields of gothic and animal studies. My own chapter, entitled “Hellish Horses and Monstrous Men: Gothic Horsemanship in Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe,” shares some of my recent research into the ways that gothic fiction uses horses and their relationship to their riders to signal changing cultural boundaries around desirable and undesirable masculinity. (more…)
I am very excited to announce the publication of a wonderful collection of essays entitled Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, edited by Michael Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson (Winged Lion Press, 2018). Based on ground-breaking research presented at the George MacDonald Society Conference at The University of Oxford, 2014, which you can read about here, this collection of essays represents new directions not only in George MacDonald studies but also studies in Victorian fantasy, imagination, philosophy, science and more besides. Each of the twelve essays explores how MacDonald and fellow literary figures such as S. T. Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, and Andrew Lang paved the way for the group of twentieth-century fantasy authors known as “the Inklings,” including C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. With contributions from major critics in the field such as Stephen Prickett, Malcolm Guite, Jean Webb and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, as well as newer voices from a range of international scholars, this book treads new territory while returning us to the roots of modern fantasy literature. (more…)
I’m very excited to announce the release of a wonderful new book on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which includes 17 chapters by international scholars (including my own) in celebration of Frankenstein‘s 200th anniversary! Global Frankenstein, edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts is published this month by Palgrave Macmillan. It has been called a “welcome collection of articles—about Frankenstein and science and technology, medicine and monstrosity, the spectacular and the visual…and the future—by a new generation of scholars,” which “brings the story up to date by viewing it from the perspectives, and through the concerns, of today. It’s a very suitable, and suitably global, 200th birthday celebration” (Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years [2017]).
My chapter is entitled “Frankenstein in Hyperspace: The Gothic Return of Digital Technologies to the Origins of Virtual Space in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” It explores the uncanny return to elements of Mary Shelley’s context brought on by (more…)
Having explored some of the many fascinating and spooky contexts surrounding Mary Shelley’s novel, this final post for my 200th Anniversary Series looks at the novel’s entry into the glamorous world of film. Frankenstein has entered popular culture in a massive way, largely influenced by the famous 1931 film starring Boris Karloff with his neck bolts and lumbering frame, but did you know that this isn’t the earliest film adaptation of Frankenstein? Over twenty years earlier, in 1910, Edison Studios released a 15-minute feature that has become one of the most interesting films of the silent era. Designed to be accompanied by music, it loosely adapts Mary Shelley’s plot to represent the first time the monster was seen on screen. (more…)
A nervous crowd huddles in the makeshift amphitheater of a house near London’s Newgate Prison. The hum of voices rises and falls with the excited whispers and troubled exclamations of the surgeons and attending officials who have come to witness this spectacle. The lamps flicker overhead, casting a pool of wan light onto a table in the centre of the crowd; upon it, the pale, lifeless body of a man, hanged only hours before. In life he had been a murderer; now the purple bruise of the hangman’s noose swells darkly on his cold neck. The man leading the show busies himself around the corpse with shining metal equipment. An electric battery stands nearby, and the man leans over the corpse brandishing two conducting rods. The crowd hushes. A scintillating tremor of expectation sizzles through the mass of eager bodies, perched, awaiting what new horrors might be opened up by this latest scientific breach of the natural world – this time, of the boundary between life and death. The rods connect with the cold skin, a crackling buzz sounds – the electric pulse is delivered. A moment of quiet, and suddenly the dead man’s body moves. His eyes snap open and glare, glass-like, wide with animated horror at the men whose terrified gaze stares back. (more…)
Kirstin Mills is an Australian artist, writer, lecturer and researcher following her endless curiosity into realms of imagination and wonder. Read more about her life & projects here.
