Gothic Book Launch: Graveyard Gothic, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Gothic Voices

Join us at Manchester Metropolitan University to hear more about three exciting new publications in Gothic Studies which address new debates relating to death, screen studies, Gothic and Romantic literary culture and sound studies.

This celebratory launch will showcase the cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and archival work undertaken by members of our Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and their international collaborators. We are delighted that David McAllister will join us in person from London to speak about his editing role on Graveyard Gothic.

UPDATE: Unfortunately Eric Parisot is now unable to join us for this event.

This is a free hybrid event, so you are welcome to join us either on campus in central Manchester or online via Teams. If booking via Teams, the link will be emailed to you three days before the event and as a reminder at lunchtime on the day of the event itself.

Discounts for the books will be available for all participants.

Schedule:

16.30 - 17.00 Refreshments available in Geoffrey Manton atrium outside Lecture Theatre 4

17.00 - 17.35 Introduction and short presentations on Graveyard Gothic from two of the editors. David McAllister will discuss the experience of writing a book on graveyards during a pandemic in which our customary modes of dealing with the dead were suspended, raising questions about gothic graveyards now and in years to come. Xavier Aldana Reyes will speak about the audio-visual part of the book: how the editors settled on the cinema, television and video games chapters and what was hoped these different media would contribute to the project.

17.35-17.50 Presentation on Matthew Gregory Lewis by Dale Townshend

17.50 - 18.05 Presentation on Gothic Voices by Matt Foley

18.05-18.30 Q and A

Book Blurbs and Author Bios:

Graveyard Gothic https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526166319/

Graveyard Gothic is the first sustained consideration of the graveyard as a key Gothic locale. This volume examines various iterations of the Gothic graveyard (and other burial sites) from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, as expressed in numerous forms of culture and media including poetry, fiction, TV, film and video games. The volume also extends its geographic scope beyond British traditions to accommodate multiple cultural perspectives, including those from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. The seventeen chapters from key international Gothic scholars engage a range of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping potential future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic is a landmark volume defining a new area of Gothic studies.

Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/matthew-gregory-lewis/

This volume provides a comprehensive account of the oeuvre of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818), from his juvenilia through to his romances and shorter tales, dramas, translations, adaptations, ballads, poetry and editorial endeavours, and into his posthumously published writings on slavery. Across an extended introduction and six chapters, the argument offers fresh considerations of Lewis’s well-known Gothic works whilst also providing coverage of his more obscure published and unpublished texts. Based on extensive archival research undertaken in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, the book restores to critical focus a number of Lewis’s works that have not previously been given scholarly attention. While drawing, where relevant, upon the biographical studies of earlier critics, the study remains first and foremost a literary history, and the first closely to situate this most prolific, versatile and influential of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British writers in relation to Gothic and Romantic literary culture more broadly.

Gothic Voices:The Vococentric Soundworld of Gothic Writing (Cambridge Elements)

https://www.cambridge.org/gb/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1700-1830/gothic-voices-vococentric-soundworld-gothic-writing?format=PB

This Element provides new ways of reading the soundscape of the Gothic text. Drawing inspiration from the field of 'sonic Gothic' studies, which has been spearheaded by the writings of Isabella van Elferen, as well as from Mladen Dolar's articulation of the psychoanalytic 'object' voice, this study introduces the critical category of 'vococentric Gothic' into Gothic scholarship. In so doing, it reads important moments in Gothic fiction when the voice takes precedence as an uncanny, monstrous or seductive object. Historically informed, the range of readings proffered demonstrate the persistence of these vocal motifs across time (from the Gothic romance to contemporary Gothic) and across intermedia forms (from literature to film to podcasts). Gothic Voices, then, provides the first dedicated account of voices of terror and horror as they develop in the Gothic mode from the Romantic period until today.

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His publications include the books Gothic Cinema (Routledge, 2020), Horror: A Literary History (British Library Publishing, 2016), Horror Film and Affect (Routledge, 2016) and Body Gothic (UWP, 2014). Xavier is co-president of the International Gothic Association and chief editor of the Horror Studies academic book series.

Dale Townshend is Professor of Gothic Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. His many publications on eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century literature include Writing Britain’s Ruins (co-edited with Michael Carter and Peter Lindfield; British Library, 2017)and Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford University Press, 2019). With Angela Wright, he edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Cambridge History of the Gothic, a major, three-volume collection of essays published by Cambridge University Press in October 2020.

Matt Foley is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. His publications include Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism (2017), Gothic Voices (2023) and articles on the vococentric Gothic.

David McAllister is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is also Director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. He is the author of a monograph, Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1970-1848, along with numerous articles on a wide range of Victorian and Romantic writers.

Eric Parisot is an Associate Professor in English at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia). His research interests lie in British eighteenth-century literature and culture, especially related to death and suicide, and the Gothic. He is the author of Graveyard Poetry (Ashgate, 2013) and Jane Austen and Vampires (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).