Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House & Robert Wise’s Haunting: Quintessential Gothic & Film Noir

“Hill House” — a genuine house just outside London, chosen as embodying just what Jackson imagined, and then photographed as where all the outdoor scenes around it using infrared light (1963 The Haunting) John Atkinson Grimsaw (1836-93), The Haunted House (1882) Dear Readers, Students, Friends, Tonight one of the great American gothic novels and psychological [...]

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Bob Dixon: “what picture of the world is presented to children through literature?”

From recent movie attempt to improve the Robinson Crusoe perspective: Crusoe (Aiden Quinn) and the Warrior (Ade Sapara) in Caleb Deschanel’s Crusoe Arthurian tales often show the process of rising slowly through violence and obedience in an aristocratic society — that’s what the boys are shown. Dear friends and readers, Another blog which is partly [...]

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Sarah Waters’s Affinity: be wary of your affinity, or, deceit and betrayal

Anna Madeley as Margaret Prior in Andrew Davies’s film adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Affinity (2008 ITV). Dear friends and readers, Although I’ve not seen Davies’s film adaptation of Sarah Waters’s remarkable and powerful neo-Victorian neo-Gothic novel (indeed just found out about it when I was googling for information about the novel and its various covers), [...]

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Winston Graham’s Forgotten Story: again marital rape, again Cornwall (1898); cf w/Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn

North coast of Cornwall, just above Crackington Haven, Boscastle Dear friends and readers, I recently read another Winston Graham novel, a novella really, The Forgotten Story, set in 1898, written 1945. I had not expected but found (once again) central to a Graham novel, a marital rape, and central to the atmosphere Cornwall. It’s one [...]

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Books in art and science (Sharp 4): Fairy books; Medical books, outsiders, & handbooks as territorial struggles; Keepsakes, Alice in Wonderland and Pitman sten

The Blue Fairy Book, compiled (and written by) Andrew Lang Alice in Wonderland — in translation Dear friends and readers, I am come to the fourth and last blog on this conference. Today topics included the fantastical and imaginative (fairy books and math and Alice in Wonderland), just its seeming opposite, medical memoirs, and large [...]

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Dickens’s “Signalman:” The Trauma of Technology; or Victorian Gothic

The train that thunders through (Dicken’s “The Signal-man” as adapted in the 1975 film) Dear friends and readers, I’ve another gothic from my Exploring the Gothic class to discuss: for this past Friday my class and I read and discussed Charles Dickens’s unusual and brief ghost story, “The Signalman.” I’ve written about Andrew Davies’s 1976 [...]

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Two Sherlock Holmes Tales: The violent labyrinth

Closing of Abbey Grange (Jeremy Brett & Edward Hardwicke as Holmes & Watson, 1986) Dear friends and readers, In my Exploring the Gothic classes, we’ve read and discussed two of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and we’ve watched the 1984 “Adventure of Abbey Grange” (1986 BBC The Return of Sherlock Holmes) and “The Adventure [...]

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Henry James’s Turn of the Screw: the problem of moral panic

The governess realizes Miles is dead becomes frantic with grief (Turn of the Screw by Sandy Welch, 2009) Dear friends and readers, I feel I’ve had a full Henry James double season. First this summer, Roderick Hudson, then the biography of James by Fred Kaplan, and now as part of the course “exploring the gothic” [...]

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Gothics and ghosts, romance and the supernatural: & Summerscale’s Suspicions of Mr Whicher

A still from a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”: Mary Boyne (Kate Harper) crossing an invisible threshold into the uncanny Dear friends and readers, I thought I’d tell about the list of books I’ve gotten up for two sections of English 201: Reading and Writing about Texts, a freshman and sophomore level literature course [...]

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Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni: taking refuge in the pastoral

Giovanni (Christopher Maltman) and Leporello (Erwin Schrott) awaiting the Commendatore (Anatoli Kotscherga) “If the joke against him [Macheath, here Giovanni] is that he is vain to adopt the grand manner of the genteel rakes he at least stands their own final test; he has the courage to sustain it” (Empson, “The Beggar’s Opera,” Some Versions [...]

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