Non-Fiction Gothic: Ghost and vampires in the 60s and 70s w. Dr Tim Jones

Romancing the Gothic is an independent online education project run by Dr Sam Hirst which offers a range of classes, courses and groups

Romancing the Gothic

Non-Fiction Gothic: Reading about ghosts and vampires in the British 60s and 70s with Dr Tim Jones

Gothic studies focuses on fictional narrative forms, especially prose and film, but typically argues that Gothic texts articulate and critique the historical ‘real’ through various metaphorical figures. Castles are read as homes, monsters are apprehended as meaning machines, and ghosts indicate buried histories. This presentation endeavours to interrupt these established critical habits by considering the kinds of books that end up uncomfortably shelved in the &#x27;spirituality&#x27; shelves of charity shops - non-fiction works produced in Britain throughout the twentieth century but especially in the 1960s and 70s, which are adjacent to the fictional Gothic; texts like Ornella Volta’s The Vampire (1965), Peter Haining’s The Satanists (1969), Dennis Wheatley’s Library of the Occult series (1974-7) and Christopher Maynard’s World of the Unknown: Ghosts (1977). These works do not easily yield the kinds of metaphorical readings that Gothic studies emphasises, and instead offer readers credulous and ‘authentic’ accounts of key Gothic figures. In these texts, both fictional and non-fictional Gothic slips between various qualities of knowing, between text and history. By reading the fictional Gothic through the frame of Gothic non-fiction, we can see that the fiction might legitimately be about ghosts, vampires, occultists and so forth before it takes on metaphorical meanings. Derrida thought the ‘traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts’. I will argue that to some extent, within Gothic studies, we must, because the various Gothic figures we study have an integrity and even a reality that exceed their metaphorical function for the genre’s audience.

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Non-Fiction Gothic: Ghost and vampires in the 60s and 70s w. Dr Tim Jones

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