Gothic Realities

A Postgraduate and Early-Career Researcher Symposium at The University of Stirling
Thursday October 24th to Friday October 25th, 2019
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Julia Round, Bournemouth University

Since its inception, Gothic has had a complex and fascinating relation to the real. Its origins in the mid and late-eighteenth century are imbued with the socio-cultural emergence of modernity, yet the Gothic Romances of this period, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and those of Ann Radcliffe, playfully offset any historical veracity through fakery, phantasy and terror. The genre’s resurgence as a mode in the nineteenth century, and as an ever-increasingly plastic substance or style in the twentieth and twenty-first, has resulted in an explosion of Gothic literature and media. From its narratives and counter-narratives of property ownership, Empire, Queerness, technology, and life itself, Gothic has produced a multitude of metafictional realities –political and ontological.

On Thursday the 24th of October, The University of Stirling’s International Centre for Gothic Studies will be hosting a roundtable discussion, introducing and exploring issues relating to Gothic Realities and the ways in which the consistently plural literature of the Gothic interacts with new media, mediums, and cultures. This will be followed by a one-day symposium on Friday the 25th of October, aimed (though not exclusively) at showcasing the scholarship of postgraduate and early-career Gothic researchers, on areas of Gothic Realities. We are seeking 20-minute papers around this theme, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Gothic and History
• Gothic and Global Culture
• Gothic and Religion(s)
• Colonial and Post-Colonial Gothic
• Gothic Ontology
• Gothic and Dreams
• Gothic on Film and TV
• LGBTQ Gothic
• Gothic and Alternate Reality/Dimensions
• Madness and the Gothic
• Gothic, Memory, and Nostalgia
• Gothic Antiquities and Artefacts
• Gothic Comics and Graphic Novels
• Videogaming, Tabletop Gaming, and the Gothic
• Gothic Performances/the Stage
• Augmented/Virtual Reality and the Gothic
• Gothic Doubles/Splitting
• The Gothic Online

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to gothicrealities@stir.ac.uk by Monday the 16th of September. If you have further questions, please visit our website FAQ at https://gothicrealities.home.blog/faqs/, or email the symposium organisers directly at gothicrealities@stir.ac.uk. Our Twitter is @stirlinggoths.

This event is funded and organised by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities Discipline+ Catalyst Scottish and English Literature. Discipline+ Catalysts allow us to share the best of our disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise across all of our members for the benefit of all of our doctoral researchers.

The Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities is the world’s first national graduate school in the Arts & Humanities. Our membership includes sixteen Scottish HEIs, from the oldest to the newest including our art schools and national conservatoire.