Bodies and Blood: Thoughts on the Contemporary Gothic

2022-04-26

5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Thomas.Duggett@xjtlu.edu.cn

Details

  • Time: 17:30-19:00 CST, 10:30-12:00 GMT
  • Date: 26 April 2022
  • Venue: Zhumu, please contact: Thomas.Duggett@xjtlu.edu.cn for Zhumu details

Abstract

Gothic ideas, manifested in literature, film and TV, continue to thrive and grow across the world. Often, contemporary Gothic texts refer back to much earlier texts: the writings of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer, for example, and numerous films and TV series take their cue from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In this talk, I want to focus on two contemporary literary texts, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013). Saadawi’s novel is, of course, directly related to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Burnet’s work, although perhaps a little less obviously, takes on the narrative apparatus and concerns of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Both books, although they are very different, are concerned with violence; with history and how history is narrated; and with the effects of deprivation and religious extremism.

Speaker

Professor Punter has published extensively on Gothic and Romantic literature; on contemporary writing; and on literary theory, psychoanalysis, and the postcolonial, as well as four volumes of poetry.

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