Gothic Monsters in East Asian Culture

This annotated biblio/film/discography, crowd-sourced internationally from students and scholars of Gothic in East Asia (particularly Japan), came out of a priming project funded by the University of York’s Culture and Communications Research Champions funding during summer 2016. This was led by Sarah Olive (then York, now Bangor, UK) and Alex Watson (then Nagoya, now Meiji, Japan). It was expanded through the Gothic in Japan symposium, held at Nagoya University in January 2018, with Daiwa and ESRC funding. Making it a freely-available, online resource was intended to offer starting points for teachers, students and researchers interested in the influence of British Gothic monsters (with a focus largely on the nineteenth century) on twentieth-­ and twenty-­first century East Asian culture (with a focus on Japan as the symposium’s host country). The rationales for the project were that existing research focuses almost exclusively on identifying Orientalism in British Gothic monster texts. This is despite the fact that for over two hundred years, British Gothic literature has been highly popular in East Asia, inspiring a slew of adaptations, reinventions and  afterlives. The organisers’ aim beyond the priming project was to develop a more reciprocal, cross-­cultural model of scholarship, in which Asian Gothic is recognised as an important part of the Gothic tradition.