OUT NOW: Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, ed. Robert McKay and John Miller (University of Wales Press, 2017)

A new academic edited collection on werewolves from University of Wales Press, featuring a chapter by me on bad dads, painful transformations and the embarrassment of morning-after nudity...

Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.

This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.

Contents

- Introduction, Robert McKay and John Miller
- Like Father Like Son: Wolf-Men, Paternity and the Male Gothic, Hannah Priest
- Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes: Lycanthropic Femme Fatales in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras, Jazmina Cininas
- Postcolonial Vanishings: Wolves, American Indians, and Contemporary Werewolves, Michelle Nicole Boyer
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ubernatural: The Other(ed) Werewolf in Twilight, Roman Bartosch and Celestine Caruso
- ‘Becoming woman’/Becoming Wolf: Girl Power and the Monstrous Feminine in the Ginger Snaps Trilogy, Batia Boe Stolar
- ‘Something that is either werewolf or vampire’: Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Kaja Franck
- Saki, Nietzsche and the Superwolf, John Miller
- A Vegetarian Diet for the Were-wolf Hunger of Capital: Leftist and Pro-animal Thought in Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, Robert McKay
- Everybody Eats Somebody: Angela Carter’s Wolfish Ecology, Margot Young
- ‘But by Blood No Wolf Am I’: Language and Agency, Instinct and Essence – Transcending Antinomies in Maggie Steifvater’s Shiver Trilogy, Bill Hughes
- Transforming the Big Bad Wolf: Redefining the Werewolf through Grimm and Fables, Matthew Lerberg

For more information, please visit the publisher's website.

Gothic to Goth: a weekend course in London

Come and take a trip to the dark side…

This October, I’ll be running Gothic to Goth, a weekend course at the V&A in London. With lectures over two days, the course will cover everything from Bram Stoker to Robert Smith… from Sweeney Todd to Edward Cullen… from Strawberry Hill to Silent Hill.

Gothic to Goth will be on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd October, 11-4pm. I’ll be giving lectures on penny dreadfuls, Gothic romance and horror literature/film, and there’ll be some other wonderful lecturers giving talks on Gothic architecture, Dracula, Goth music and Alexander McQueen.

You can register for the course via the V&A website (info about course fees can also be found here), but here’s a little taste of what the programme will look like…

Saturday 21st October

Session 1. The Gothic Past
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 2. Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill
Lecturer: tbc
Session 3. Penny Dreadfuls and Victorian Pulp Fiction
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 4. Enter Dracula
Lecturer: Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, MMU

Sunday 22nd October

Session 1. Goodbye Romance, Hello Horror
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 2. Dark, Punk and Goth
Lecturer: Professor Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University
Session 3. Gothic Style and Alexander McQueen
Lecturer: Claire Wilcox, V&A
Session 4. The Gothic Future
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest

Weekend courses at the V&A give you the opportunity to spend a couple of days immersing yourself in a topic, learning from experts, and enjoying the splendour of the V&A building.

To find out more about Gothic to Goth, or to register for the course, please click here for details.

A little video about my local park...

In July, it was #LoveParks week, an initiative by Keep Britain Tidy intended to show 'how much our country loves parks'. As you may or may not know, I'm on the committee of Friends of Crumpsall Park, and I took the lead this year on our #LoveParks activity.

Crumpsall Park is a small urban park in North Manchester, officially opened in 1899. Crumpsall isn't the richest area in the city (though it's not the poorest), and it doesn't always get the best press. In fact, it doesn't always get any press at all, as our local paper is notorious for its lack of reporting on the north side of the city. The best we can usually expect is coverage of crime, complaints about the hospital, and the occasional story about someone being fined for fly-tipping.

Things were very different at the end of the nineteenth century. Crumpsall had only just been incorporated into the City of Manchester, and it was still (in places) quite rural. Having escaped the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution, Crumpsall was slowly being developed into a city suburb, as new houses were built to accommodate Manchester's workforce - leading to the construction of new schools, shops and parks for the benefit of residents.

At the official opening ceremony of Crumpsall Park in 1899, the Lord Mayor addressed the crowd, acknowledging that, given that Crumpsall was 'more or less in the country', the construction of a new park might seem unnecessary. He added: 'some of [you] might think it was not wanted to-day, but a time would come when [your] successors would say that the Corporation had done well in securing it.'

Crumpsall can no longer (by any stretch of the imagination) be described as 'more or less in the country', and I thought it would be nice to see what the people of today's Crumpsall think of our little park.

So I asked, and this is what they said...