Abstracts and Bios

(listed in first-name alphabetical order)

Abhinaba Chatterjee (Independent Scholar)

The ‘Supernatural’ India: A Study of Orientalism in Bithia Mary Croker’s ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’

Maurizio Ascari, in his A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational, linked the element of gothic with crime ever since ‘the original sin.’ However, the imperial politics has played a major role in depicting the Indian/ Oriental as the ‘Other’ – the Cain, which ‘display … evil power associated with dungeons and danger, and with a distorted view of religious or political orthodoxy’ (Ascari 2007: 41). This paper will analyse Bithia Mary Croker’s ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’ to posit a critique of the association of the ‘supernatural’ with India – a former colony.

Bithia Mary Croker (1849-1920) used her fourteen years in India and Burma to write novels stories based on her first-hand experiences within the British colonial empire. The story is narrated from the point of view of a native English woman, who encounters ghostly crimes during her travels through the ‘Oriental’ landscapes, thereby allowing Croker to critique the British presence in India through the motif of the haunted. Croker uses the ghosts as narrative tropes to warn of the negative effects of empire while simultaneously establishing her female narrators as witnesses to these ghosts. These women, therefore, become privileged critics of the English imperial presence. The ghost story of ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’ serves as an impetus for the female protagonists to recognize their role as participants in the imperialist culture. They may not be fully reformed as a result of their experience, but they do begin to appreciate that their presence in India has greater significance than ‘moonlight picnics’ and ‘whist-parties.’

Abhinaba Chatterjee holds a Master’s degree in English Literature and Translation Studies from Calcutta University & Annamalai University respectively and an MPhil degree from Delhi University. He has published extensively on various fields of English literature, including Shakespeare, Indian Writings in English (IWE) and postcolonial theory. He has also presented papers in many National and International seminars, both in India and abroad. He is particularly interested in Indian Writings in English, Modernity in Indian Literature, Modern Drama, Postcolonial Literature and Translation Studies. He is presently pursuing doctoral research in Absurd Drama.

Aestheticization of Crime for Bourgeois Entertainment:  Two Bengali Serial Killer Films

The Bengali-language Indian film Baishe Srabon (dir. Srijit Mukherji, 2011) and its sequel Dwitiyo Purush (dir. Srijit Mukherji, 2020) climactically disrupt the ethico-legal certainties associated with the figure of the investigating officer in a police procedural or detective thriller, revealing the police officer himself to be a serial killer. Acting in the mode of urban gothic, these two films reformulate such disruption as an aesthetic stimulus for the bourgeois audience of the multiplexes – rather than a radical threat to it.

Baishe Srabon (the title meaning the 22^nd day of the Bengali month of Srabon, the date of Rabindranath Tagore’s death) shows the junior officer Abhijit Pakrashi assisting the maverick ex-cop Prabir Roy Chowdhury to catch a serial killer who commits murder on the death anniversary of famous Bengali poets and leaves lines penned by the poet concerned close to the corpse. At the end of the film, Roy Chowdhury reveals before killing himself that he has masterminded all the murders in order to avenge himself on the police department. Dwitiyo Purush (‘The Second Man’) shows Pakrashi, now a reputed senior officer, trying to catch a serial killer who curves the name ‘Khoka’ on the forehead of those he murders, just like a teenage gangster of the same name did 25 years earlier. It transpires only at the end of the film that Detective Pakrashi is the young serial killer of yore, whose identity has been doctored by the police to give him a decent life. Besides, the character projected by the film as the adult ‘Khoka’ is revealed to be Khoka’s homosexual lover who has been committing copycat murders in order to send a message to his lost partner. These two films problematize the function of identifying criminological authorities, but they perform other ideological roles (ascribed to crime films by Hahn Rafter 2000) such as assuring that crime is explicable, defining ‘the crime problem,’ and guiding the audience’s emotional reaction to crime. Besides, the motif of serial killing (with its inherent pattern) helps aestheticize crime while also localizing criminality conveniently in an atypical, deviant character (Baelo Allue 2002). These two films’ investment in Pakrashi’s turbulent relationship with his girlfriend (later wife) ensures that the audience views criminality from the middle-class perspective and not from the perspective of the underworld (which it packages for bourgeois entertainment).

Dr Abhishek Sarkar teaches at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He specializes in the literatures and cultures of early modern England and colonial Bengal. He has received the Charles Wallace fellowship and completed a major research project and a minor research project sponsored by the Government of India.

Ae-soon Choi (Keimyung University, South Korea)

A Bizarre Variation of Korean Literature Films in the 1970s – A Mystery Surrounded by Islands, Shamans, and Legends

In 1977, The characteristic of Korean Gothic was well revealed in the film Ieodo directed by Kim Ki-young and Chobun directed by Lee Doo-yong. Both works were based on Lee Cheong-jun’s Ieodo (1974) and Oh Tae-seok’s Chobun (1973) respectively. While these literary works turned into the movies, a motif about a shaman and about a gloomy atmosphere as if something is about to happen have been inserted into it with creating a bizarre variation, which cannot be found in those originals. The films Ieodo and Chobun were reborn as works through unraveling the bizarre mysteries of islands, shamans, and legends, which were completely different from the originals. By inserting a ‘shaman,’ the legend about the island of Ieodo which has been passed down to the people of Jeju Island in Ieodo and the legend of the funerals in the southwestern island coast in Chobun bizarrely varied to create a mysterious case. In this paper I attempt to examine how the mystery in the 1970s’ Korean literary films, involving islands, shamans, and legends, varied into a gothic aspect as it is interwoven with a supernatural and mysterious atmosphere rather than ending with finding out the criminal in a detective novel or a crime novel.

Ae-soon Choi is Assistant Professor at Keimyung University in South Korea. Her research interests include Korean popular genre literature with particular emphasis on the detective novels, Science Fiction, and horror. She has published The History of the Detective Novels of Colonial Choson, and The Rediscovery of Science Fiction – Chronology of Korean Science Fiction in Novels and Cartoons.

Amala Poli (Western University, Ontario)

Knowledge and the Uncanny in The Hound of the Baskervilles

This paper seeks to examine the uncanny in detective fiction through Sherlock Holmes’ The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). I seek to unpack the relationship between fear and criminality through the setting as a tension between knowledge and uncertainty in the novel. In presenting the family manuscript from 1742 to Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Dr Mortimer reads out an account of the mysterious events surrounding the origin of the hound’s fame. It states at the end, ‘If I have set it down it is because that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed’ (Doyle: 17). Yet, the inverse of this is true in the text, as the account of these mysterious events is precisely what creates fear in Sir Charles Baskerville, who sets much store by the written word, villagers’ accounts, and hearsay about the Baskerville hound. This fear acts as a powerful agent in his murder when the hound is set upon him.

The nineteenth century was prominent in the history of sleep and peripheral consciousness through studies on the physiology of sleep, sleeping disorders, and a fictional preoccupation with alternate states of consciousness (Schatz 2015). Recent sociologists have analyzed the relationship between culture, sleep, and society (Brunt 2008; Williams 2005; Wolf-Meyer 2012). By contextualizing the text in nineteenth century studies on sleep and consciousness, I will explore the playful gothic undertones of the tension between scientific positivity and uncertainty in the text.

Amala Poli is a doctoral student in Health Humanities at the Department of English in Western University. She is the author of Writing the Self in Illness (2019), an examination of the role of experiential narratives in reshaping knowledge about disease through a study of memoirs in North America and India centred around specific conditions. Amala is a writer at Synapsis, a health humanities journal based out of Columbia University. Her research currently examines sleep paralysis and the role of narrative as evidence in understanding parasomnias.

Anna Christie K. Villarba-Torres (University of the Philippines Baguio, Philippines)

Subverting Social Order: A Critique of Selected Philippine Crime Fiction

Crime fiction is commonly defined as literature wherein crime or transgression plays a pivotal role. As a distinct genre, it is marked by formulas that distinguish it from other popular genres such as romance, melodrama and adventure. Philippine crime fiction, though not new (National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin has published two volumes that are largely based on his experiences as a news reporter), is distinguishable in that it thrives in the depiction of stark social realities of the urban metropolis.  This particular study looks into selected short fiction included in two more contemporary Philippine crime fiction anthologies, Crimetime: Inspector SJ Tuason Case Files (2017) by Filipinos Maria L.M. Fres-Felix and Ang Nawawala / The Missing (2017) by Chuckberry J. Pascual through the lens of political literary criticism with emphasis on gender and feminist perspectives. These perspectives are anchored on the interdisciplinary approach of gender studies or the intersection of gender with other categories of identity and representation, specifically sexuality and class.

Anna Christie K. Villarba-Torres is Professor of English at the University of the Philippines Baguio. With a doctorate in Philippine Studies from the University of the Philippines Diliman, she teaches literature, literary theory and popular culture in English and Filipino at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Aparajita Hazra (Diamond Harbour University, India)

Crime and the Supernatural: Reading the Gothic Undertones in the Crime Fiction of Hemendra Roy

Crime stories and detective novels, notwithstanding their literal and epistemic divide, have regaled minds by the million. Yet the niggling question that clouds the mind is that, is detective or crime fiction ever awarded the pride of place alongside canonical texts? Marjorie Nicholson talks of how crime fiction often relieves the mind from the ‘lethean monotony’ of highbrow literature. Yet, critics like Edmund Wilson and Stefano Tani grade crime and detective fiction as ‘low’ genre. On the other hand, Gothic literature too has often seen dismissal as a subgenre, a notch lower than mainstream literature. One Indian author, Hemendra Kumar Roy, brings crime and the Gothic together to create literature that has regaled minds ever since his detective-sidekick duo Jayanta and Manik went on their slew of adventures that were often laced with supernatural happenings. Unlike Hodgson’s Carnacki, Jayanta-Manik were not out to hunt ghosts amidst mystery, but rather, the other way around. This paper will try to find the raison d’etre of the compatibility of crime and the gothic, with Hemendra Kumar Roy’s literature as referential test case.

Prof. Dr Aparajita Hazra is Dean of Arts and Professor in the Department of English in Diamond Harbour Women’s University, West Bengal, India. She has been widely published and has presented papers widely in India, France, New Zealand, Macau, Malaysia, Canada, Ireland, Georgia and Scotland. She has authored The Terrible Beauty, Her Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Brontës: A Sorority of Passion, Marlowe, the Muse’s Darling and The Art of Articulation from Macmillan Publishers. An Anthology on the Gothic is on the way. She is the recipient of the Noble Asian Educational Leader Award, 2020, the Asian Education Award 2021, the National Faculty Award for 2021-22.

Aratrika Mandal (Independent Scholar)

The Haunted Mountains and the Haunting Past: A Study of Gothic Spaces in Trapped

One of the defining factors common to Nordic Noir genre is the remote latitude, chilling topographies, and severe climatic and environmental profile that besides representing a region-specific geographical paradigm, consistently evokes an element of ruthlessness and horror. The present study looks at the first two seasons of the Icelandic TV series Ófærð/Trapped (RÚV, 2015-2019) to analyse the gothic embedded space that complicates the process of investigation. While at the outset, there are political and economic relations leading to discordance among the inhabitants of a quiet fjord township of Iceland, there are secrets from the past that transpose on these conflicts, carefully tying the past with the present. In the first season, the investigation resolves to trace the mystery of a torso rescued from the fjord in the backdrop of the construction of a port to facilitate Icelandic economy with global expansion, soon exposing how a difficult secret had significantly altered the inter-community dynamics. In the second season, the expansion on the industrial front is challenged by a far-right extremist group, linking several murders with a buried family secret.

The paper examines how in both seasons, the uncanniness of the steep glacial terrain acts as an extension of the concealed pasts, where these liminal morbid locations become an ally to crimes. It then discusses the promises of the new capitalistic ventures which though align with the Icelandic welfare system, come with attendant modern problems such as human trafficking and neo-Nazism. And finally, it discusses how the stylistic of the narrative doubles the nature’s enabling of fear, anxiety at both personal and community-level.

Aratrika Mandal is a PhD candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. Her research focuses on the intersection of identity and space in Nordic Noir. Her interests include popular culture, television studies and the social theories of urban culture.

Arthit Jiamrattanyoo (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)

Singing Crimes, Rhyming News: Folksong Newsprint and the Rise of Sensationalist Mass Media in Siam, 1920s-1940s

The emergence of sensationalist mass media in Siam coincided with the expanding popularity of lamtat and lae, two metrical forms of Thai folk singing widespread in the country’s central plain. Beginning in the 1920s, the forms were appropriated by urban bourgeois journalists and writers in Bangkok to compose news stories and social commentaries with doses of topical and stylistic sensationalization. Published in newspapers or serialized in cheap booklets, this popular literature was a versified Thai equivalent of British penny dreadfuls, particularly with its wide accessibility and typical focus on ghosts or criminals – sometimes a combination of both – such as murderers, bandits, and corrupt government officials.

Drawing upon methods from book history and media studies, my paper unearthes this peculiarly hybrid genre of news reporting and examines its narrative elements along with its production, distribution, and consumption during the first half of the twentieth century. It locates the formation of folksong newsprint at the intersection of vernacular oral tradition, print capitalism, and journalistic culture. In so doing, it argues that by integrating modern and traditional, factual and fictional, as well as oral, musical, and written components, the genre represented a new aesthetic of horror and violence that shaped the media sensibilities of a growing Thai readership and, therefore, anticipated the lurid intensification of print sensationalism in post-WWII Thailand.

Arthit Jiamrattanyoo received a doctoral degree in Southeast Asian history from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2022. He is an incoming lecturer in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. His areas of interest include modern Thai literature and periodical studies.

Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott (Waseda University, Japan)

‘Magic tricks, of course’: Gothic Conjuring in Japanese Honkaku Texts

Japanese crime fiction is increasingly accessible to Anglophone audiences, with the recent English publications of classics such as Yokomizo Seishi’s Kindaichi novels and Ayatsuji Yukito’s The Decagon House Murders. These texts often reference contemporaneous Western crime literature, which began to enter Japan during the twentieth century. Yokomizo’s texts, especially, often focus on inherited guilt or revenge for historical crimes, identified by Catherine Spooner (2010) as an inherently Gothic element of crime. Shimada Sōji, in his introduction to Ayatsuji’s novel, notes too that detective fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ was, in his view, ‘inspired by the Gothic novel’ (2015). Yokomizo’s most popular Kindaichi novel, 犬神家の一族 The Inugami Clan, was retitled in translation in 2007 and 2020 as The Inugami Curse, further emphasising its inherently Gothic structure, especially to Anglophone audiences.

Taking these two texts as its focus, this paper argues that another strand connects the two spheres of Western and Japanese crime fiction: the theme of conjuring or magic tricks, often used to enhance their Gothic setting, as a key part of the crimes. ‘Western style’ magic, separate from traditional Japanese conjuring known as tezuma, continues to be very popular in Japan, and both styles frequently engage with Gothic and ghostly elements, including their incorporation of yōkai or ghost stories. Using key examples of the honkaku and shin-honkaku schools of Japanese crime literature, this paper would ultimately consider the use of Western-style conjuring tricks as a means to connect with global traditions of crime literature and the Gothic.

Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott completed her PhD at the University of Portsmouth on Victorian magician autobiographies and representations of fictional conjuring. She has most recently contributed to Magic: A Companion (2022, Peter Lang) and has previously published in Victorian Popular Fictions Journal and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Her other research interests include occulture and contemporary Japanese literature, which she currently teaches, among other courses, at CityLit. She is currently a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Bede Scott (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Indices of the Esoteric: Crime, Forensic Science, and the Supernatural

[I]t is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true.

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ 1841

This paper explores the conjunction of the supernatural and the forensic in Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ Tail of the Blue Bird (2009). More specifically, I will be discussing the perspectival modulation that both the novel and its protagonist undergo as a consequence of a simple journey into the provinces. Kayo Odamtten, a forensic pathologist, has been sent to investigate a suspected murder in the remote Ghanaian village of Sonokrom. Although he relies on standard forensic procedures when he first arrives in the village, Kayo is eventually forced to utilize other perspectives, other epistemologies, in order to solve the mystery. And as we shall see, this reorientation of the story also influences the novel at the level of discourse and genre, transforming a conventional work of detective fiction into something else altogether – something far more equivocal and difficult to categorize.

Bede Scott is Associate Professor of World Literature in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of On Lightness in World Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2019). His most recent articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and English Studies.

Brontë Schiltz (Manchester Metropolitan University)

‘Of course it doesn’t make sense, it’s not real’: Dream as Detection in Twin Peaks and Sherlock

At the end of the third episode of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking Twin Peaks (1990-1, 2017), FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, summoned to the eponymous small town in America’s Pacific Northwest to investigate the death of teenage Laura Palmer, has a strange dream that he believes offers the key to solving the case. Dreams subsequently recur throughout the programme and 1992 prequel film, Fire Walk with Me. Here, however, the lines between dream and waking reality are even further blurred – John Thorne argues that it contains another of Cooper’s dreams, disguised as reality, offering clues to decode the deeper mysteries of Twin Peaks.

Likewise, in 2016, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat produced Sherlock’s (2010-2017) only Christmas special, ‘The Abominable Bride,’ which takes the form of a dream in the Victorian setting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. Yet again, boundaries are blurred – the episode begins with a dream within a dream, there are several false awakenings and an implication that it is, in fact, the twenty first century narrative that is the dream, and, as Miranda Dawn has argued, there are frequent suggestions in the subsequent fourth season that the dream has not ended. This paper considers the role of these dreamscapes within these respectively surrealist and otherwise realist crime narratives, Gothicising the very notion of detection. In true Freudian fashion, when Cooper and Holmes dream, they encounter deeper truths not only about their cases, but also about themselves – often with deeply Gothic implications for their self-perception.

Brontë Schiltz recently graduated from the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University with an MA in English Studies. Her research interests include the televisual Gothic, the queer Gothic, the neoliberal Gothic and Penny Dreadfuls.

Carina Hart (University of Nottingham, UK)

Framed Texts and Framed Characters: Gothic Style and the Whodunnit in the Thousand and One Nights and My Name is Red

This paper draws a web of connections between the narrative technique of framed texts, the framing of visual images within narrative, and the framing of characters in the whodunnit plot. Textual framing is notable in the Gothic as well as the Thousand and One Nights (which was popular in Europe during the emergence of the Gothic mode), and the multiple levels of perspective and narrative ‘reality’ created by texts within texts correspond to the structure of the whodunnit plot, which must maintain several potential realities before the final revelation. With particular reference to ‘The Three Apples’ tale from the Thousand and One Nights and Orhan Pamuk’s 1998 novel My Name is Red, I will show how the destabilisation of linear, singular reality – as an effect that we can usefully interpret through the broad lens of the Gothic – functions in some of the Middle East’s multi-layered murder mysteries. In taking this approach the paper will also consider methods and implications of viewing Middle Eastern crime narratives through the Gothic, and reverse this by paying attention to the influence of the region in forming the European Gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dr Carina Hart is Assistant Professor in literature at the University of Nottingham (UK), specialising in global Gothic folklore and fairy tale literature. She has previously worked at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, where she began developing a specialism in Southeast Asian Gothic and folkloric literature. Carina has edited a special issue of Gothic Studies on ‘Gothic Folklore and Fairy Tale,’ and coedited an essay collection with Matthew Cheeseman, Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland. Her monograph The Gothic Fairy Tale is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.

Carissa Foo (Yale-NUS College, Singapore)

Crooked Women and P(r)etty Crimes: Lesbian Paradigms in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden

The central con amongst other cons in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) may be Lady Hideko and Sook-hee’s collaboration to turn against Count Fujiwara’s plot to claim the heiress’s inheritance; yet, their crime is not simply deceit but sexual deviance. To that end, this paper focuses on the crookedness of the women: on one hand, Sook-hee is the fingersmith, the petty criminal and Hideko is the all-knowing heiress who feigns innocence; on the other, theirs is a forbidden sexuality in 1930s colonial Korea. Historically, the term ‘crook’ is a criminal argot, referring to thieves; it is also directional, deviating from the ‘straight’ tradition which colloquially translates to ‘honest, honourable, frank.’ Criminality is a lesbian paradigm wherein ‘the shadow of the lesbian is laminated to the representation of women’s violence’ (Hart 1994). Sook-hee and Hideko are crooks who negotiate the rigidly-lined geometry of the heterosexual world and then violently destroy the storehouse of phallocratic knowledge, re-orienting themselves towards other possibilities of being that are not reliant on their male counterparts or, to use Sara Ahmed’s words, ‘not reachable on the vertical and horizontal lines of straight culture’ (2006). This paper examines the intersections of the women’s courtship and crime, positing that the lesbian contact opens directional and erotic possibilities that reform criminal propensity and queer notions of justice. By refusing to do the straight thing – be it to execute Fujiwara’s plan or to perform at Kouzouki’s erotic readings – Hideko and Sook-hee turn towards women and absolve themselves of responsibilities towards the men. Their crime is more than to inhabit a lesbian body but to make sustainable their lives as crooked women in a world that is insistently straight.

Dr Carissa Foo is a lecturer of Humanities (Literature, Writing) at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She received her PhD from Durham University, U.K., with a field of research is 20C women’s writing and its dialogues with perception theory, gender and queer studies. She has published on the workings of negative perception in modernist women’s writing including Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf; her upcoming works include a chapter on spatial politics of toilets in Singapore (Routledge) and a reading of temporal tensions in Xiaolu Guo’s romance narratives (Feminist Encounters).

Celeste McAlpin-Levitt (UC Santa Barbara, United States of America)

Hillbilly Gothic: Settler Sexuality and the Inbred Grotesque

The hillbilly is an enduring trope in the Rural Gothic subgenre, a figure who while most often associated with an American setting has evolved convergently as a broadly global character in most, if not all, settler colonial states. This apparently benign comic portrayal of the rural white lumpenproletariat’s economic, cultural, and even genetic deviance has endured as a result of the hillbilly’s symbolic saturation with social anxieties. The hillbilly’s simultaneous poverty and whiteness has led to what sociologist Matt Wray has referred to as ‘a monstrous transgressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms’: they are both settler and imagined ‘Native,’ vigorous and lazy, patriotic and delinquent, evangelist and heathen, family-centered and in violation of the normative settler sexuality that the structure of settler colonialism relies upon. The hillbilly’s duality poses an existential challenge to settler colonial states that are simultaneously invested in ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ such a contradictory subject, and as such this figure is uniquely positioned to expose the death-function in the economy of biopower. Through a comparative reading of Appalachian ‘local color’ writing and Tasmanian convict narrative, I will trace how late 19^th and early 20^th century Rural Gothic writers developed an aesthetic of the grotesque in their attempts to categorize and contend with a figure who is both a cornerstone of the structure of settler invasion and whose covert revolutionary potential has been positioned as threat to the integrity of the settler colonial dream.

Celeste McAlpin-Levitt is a PhD candidate in English at UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation explores twentieth century global Rural Gothic literature’s relationship to cultural imaginaries of the rural poor, whiteness, disability, intrafamilial sexual abuse, and queer sexuality.

Chiho Nakagawa (Nara Women’s University, Nara, Japan)

Cozy House, Gothic House: Houses in the Golden Age Mystery

Many crime fiction novels pay special attention to the house as the crime scene, the residence of a victim or a culprit, or the location of both. People normally associate the Golden Age of the detective fiction with ‘cozy mysteries,’ in which a murder often occurs in a beautiful country house, and a crime puzzle is solved in a light-hearted and humoristic manner. However, many American writers, such as Anna Katharine Green, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Mignon G. Eberhart, as well as some British writers like Ethel Lina White, place Gothic houses as the central location of their detective novels. In the Golden Age of the detective fiction, a house may be a cozy and comfortable place, or an uncanny and bone-chilling place. I would like to explore ideological differences that underlie cozy houses and Gothic houses in both British and American Golden Age mysteries by focusing on the historical concepts of home in architectural theories, homemaking manuals, and geographical studies.

Dr Chiho Nakagawa is an Associate Professor at Nara Women’s University in Nara, Japan. Her research interests include American women’s literature, Gothic novels, and more recently, crime fiction. She has published in various international and Japanese journals and contributed book chapters, including ‘Safe Sex with the Defanged Vampires: New Vampire Heroes in Twilight and the Southern Vampire Mysteries’ (2011). Her contribution to Asian Gothic lies largely in her discussion of Seishi Yokomizo – who turned her interest into crime fiction – which appeared in Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies (2013). She also translated David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to Japanese (2013).

Christophe Thouny (Ritsumeikan University, College of Global Liberal Arts, Japan)

DOKU the Destroyer – Lu Yang’s Aesthetics of Deformation

Where is Lu Yang? Not here nor there; they might well be this new horrific life form Maupassant could feel invading his everyday when the world became planetary, an invisible and unstoppable entity coming from abroad. Indeed, Lu Yang is unstoppable, unlocalizable, out of time and space. Planetary being? Asian superhero? Mad scientist? Their aesthetics are avowedly Asianesque, with clear references to Japanese otaku, Buddhism and Chinese culture. This is 1990s techno-orientalism on speed opening onto a grotesque planetary unconscious. In this presentation I discuss Lu Yang’s work in terms of an aesthetic of deformation where the grotesque flirts with the kawaii in a world without exterior, both claustrophobic nightmare and open play in place jumping to the sound of techno beats. I focus in discuss in particular on the recent DOKU – LuYang the Destroyer. As if coming from an Ultraman or Gojira series, DOKU is a giant humanoid monster dancing to the sound of fast GPM techno music in a generic urban landscape under missile rains. DOKU is the prophet of the planetary, showing us that the end has already arrived, we are living it, not here nor there, horla. The prophetic time of the planetary is the time of bricolage, of recorded live performance, of urban creative destruction amped-up to a cosmic level where life and death are relocated on a planetary continuum. This might be why the digital is for Lu Yang a tool of reincarnation.

Christophe Thouny is Associate Professor at Ritsumeikan University. His field of research covers East Asian media and urban cultures, Japanese literature, critical theory, ecocriticism and queer theory. Thouny is co-editor of Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Life After Fukushima (Palgrave Mcmillian, 2017). His current research focuses on urban ethnography and literature in pre-war Tokyo, planetary imaginations in contemporary Japanese visual culture, and water in urban culture.

Christopher Pittard (University of Portsmouth, UK)

‘A Gothic arched door’: Sherlock Holmes, Gothic Architecture and Pedagogy

In ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893), Holmes describes the Board Schools established by the 1870 Education Act as ‘lighthouses’ securing the future of the country. Yet Doyle does not turn extensively to education and schooling in the Holmes canon until The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), with four stories set in or around schools or universities. This paper addresses Return’s relation to Victorian educative discourse, and in particular the stories’ intervention in debates over utilitarian and classical modes of education. These debates become materialised in the architecture of the Holmes stories, in particular the Gothic architecture of ‘The Three Students.’ As Elizabeth Gargano notes (in Reading Victorian Schoolrooms (2008)), Gothic architecture became a potent symbol in Victorian pedagogical debates between utility and ornament: ‘architectural styles took on a symbolic resonance as embodiments of pedagogic styles… [with] classical education linked with traditional Gothic structures, and a new scientific pedagogy associated with a modern rectilinear architecture’ (15). Both Doyle’s text and Sidney Paget’s illustrations linger on the details of Gothic architecture (‘The sitting-room of our client opened by a long, low, latticed window on to the ancient lichen-tinted court of the old college. A Gothic arched door led to a worn stone staircase’), drawing attention to a pedagogical space removed from the utilitarian schoolroom’s Foucauldian lines of surveillance. Yet ‘The Three Students’ also satirises the university examination system and the cultural connection of gentlemanliness to classical education. In Doyle’s detective fiction, a more physical and material education is required to maintain the health of the nation.

Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. His publications include Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011), the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (2019), and Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian Literature (forthcoming 2024).

Damini Ray (Syamaprasad College, Kolkata)

Crimes of Many Names: The Relationship between Shinigami and Humans in Death Note

Crime fiction, particularly detective fiction has mostly steered clear of supernatural elements, spirits and ghosts, with the exception of some occult detective fiction. However, Death Note (2003-2006), the widely-acclaimed manga series written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, and later adapted into a highly successful anime series, weaves a masterful crime thriller narrative which is entirely based on the premise of the interaction between the supernatural, the gothic and the human. The ‘Shinigami,’ in the series are gods of death, inhabiting a purgatorial wasteland without purpose or meaning and when one of them – Ryuk, deliberately drops his Death Note into the human world to entertain himself, he makes way for a sustained interweaving of the Gothic and crime fiction elements in the narrative, which I intend to explore in this paper.

Ryuk’s constant hovering presence over Light, the boy who picks up the Death Note, is both a visual and metaphorical haunting – one that Light cannot and doesn’t want to be free of until death. In this conference paper, I wish to look into the dynamic between Ryuk and Light as more than that of the evil tempter and the tempted – both of them try to play elaborate, manipulative games with one another as they partake in the naming and killing of endless people in the series, in Light’s bid to rid the world of crime and evil. The noir treatment of the crime story blends well with the oppressive presence of the shinigami eyes, which see the names and lifespans of all humans, and the inescapable, deathless reach of the Death Note.

Damini Ray is currently working as an Assistant Professor of English literature and language at Syamaprasad College (University of Calcutta). She completed her MPhil research titled ‘Reimagining Female Identity and Selfhood in Late Twentieth Century Feminist Science Fiction’ in 2020, from University of Calcutta, Kolkata. She is presently pursuing PhD research on Victorian and Neo-Victorian crime fiction at Presidency University, Kolkata. Her areas of interest include genre fiction, adaptation studies, and women studies.

Debaditya Mukhopadhyay (Manikchak College, University of Gourbanga, India)

Bridging through a Reversal: Transformation of the Occult Detective Figure in Aghori

While the emergence of the detective played a crucial role in separating the genres of crime fiction from supernatural gothic, the occult detectives represent a significant manifestation of the interface between the two. The occult detectives, that is, investigators engaged with deciphering mystery and crime of the supernatural kind, however are rarely presented as an embodiment of supernatural powers. Rather, the famous characters like Flaxman Low, Dr John Silence, and Thomas Carnacki are shown to rely on logical reasoning while investigating their cases, thereby retaining the traditional dominance of rationality and by extension, western urbanity, in the narratives. Even John Constantine, despite his occult powers, retains the dominant image of the detective as an embodiment of western urbanity due to his physical appearance. A remarkable subversion of this dominant template appears in the Indian horror-comics series Aghori (2012-present) featuring the tantric Vira as an investigator of paranormal crimes. Vira differs significantly from the occult detectives mentioned above, both for his appearance and his criminal past that haunts and transforms him into a man with supernatural abilities. This paper will analyze the interaction between gothic elements and tropes of crime fiction in Aghori by focusing on the representation of Vira and his back-story. The presentation will close-read significant episodes from the series and refer to relevant theorizations regarding the interface between the supernatural and crime fiction by David I Grossvogel and Maurizio Ascari.

Debaditya Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Manikchak College, affiliated with the University of Gourbanga, India. He has done his doctoral research on Anglo-American spy fiction. His research articles on various Indian and Hollywood film adaptations have been published in peer-reviewed and UGC listed journals published from India. His publication on the Tantrik figure in Indian horror-comics City of Sorrows has been published in an edited collection from Claremont Press. He has presented his paper on the Gender Politics of the Bollywood horror film Bulbbul (2020) in GIFCon 2021. He will be presenting his paper on City of Sorrows in the conference Demons Good and Bad organized by School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies, Trinity College Dublin in October 2022.

Debora A. Sarnelli (University of Salerno, Italy)

Moving betwixt and between Boundaries: Redefining Domestic Space through Liminal Masculinities in Wilkie Collins’s Sensation Novels

Sensation fiction, a genre whose popularity reached its peak during the so-called sensational decade spanning from 1860 to 1870, adapts gothic conventions to the social and cultural scenario of the mid-Victorian period to explore the ‘sensations’ of modern life. The aim of my paper is to investigate the genre’s debt to and its modernisation of gothic liminality, both in relation to the characters it depicts and to the spaces it constitutes. Liminality refers to the threshold, the space between and betwixt clear-cut categories where the borders delineating traditional binaries and definitions can be easily blurred. Liminality is often used to define sensation fiction whose debt towards gothic fiction, the Newgate novel, melodrama and sensation journalism accentuates the hybridity of the genre that posed and still poses categorization problems.

The aim of my research is to analyse the masculinities that emerge from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novels The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866) – grounded on the existent theoretical studies on Victorian archetype of masculinity – to show how Collins’ masculinities display patent liminal attributes as they cross and re-cross the borders between accepted gender roles. As they are always described in relation to their domestic household, the research will consider, in order to investigate their peculiarities, the interpretation of domestic liminality from two different perspectives: in terms of the liminal space the houses constitute and the liminal masculine figures who inhabit them, deviating from the dominant definition of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 2005).

Debora A. Sarnelli is a post-doc research fellow at the Department of Humanities of the University of Salerno, Italy. She holds a MA in translation studies from the University of Pisa and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Salerno where she currently teaches English at undergraduate level. Her research interests focus on popular literature, detective fiction and the sensational novel. She has published several essays on Wilkie Collins’s best-known novels and Agatha Christie’s detective novels.

Deimantas Valančiūnas (Vilnius University, Lithuania)

Tropical Crime Gothic in South Indian Cinema

The new South Indian cinema (consisting of regional film industries of India’s Southern states of Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh) has been prominently showcased in the context of Indian cinematographic culture for its novel approaches to the sociocultural transformations in the region. South Indian cinema of the past decade not only exhibits various experimentations with different aesthetical and narrative patterns, but also engages with sensitive themes of caste, gender and politics. This has also led to the rise of the South Indian horror and supernatural genres, which often rework and expands generic conventions. This is most evident in the recent South Indian films Churuli (2021, directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery) and Kantara (2021, directed by Rishab Shetty), where the criminal dramas of violence and land acquisition, set in the lush, towering and impenetrable jungle, are fused with vernacular folk believes and the Gothic tropes of duality, monstrosity and obscurity. Therefore, while taking into consideration some of the most prominent new South Indian films of the supernatural / thriller genre (e.g., Jallikkatu, Churuli, Ezra, Kantara etc.) this paper will investigate South Indian cinema employs and reworks Gothic conventions and vernacular mythologies in order to critically engage with socio-political context of the region, and, especially, issues of masculinity, gendered violence and abuse of power. 

Deimantas Valančiūnas is Associate Professor of film and popular cultures of Asia at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University. His research interests include Indian cinema, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, gothic and horror cinemas in Asia. He is an editor of special journal issues and author of a number of journal articles on South Asian cinema and literature. He is also a co-editor of a book South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (2022).

Dorota Babilas (University of Warsaw, Poland)

Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910); Between the Gothic and Crime Fiction

Gaston Leroux’s original novel seems to have been eclipsed by the plethora of adaptations, the most famous of them being arguably Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 megamusical. Yet, despite the claims of the composer and his creative team, neither the novel had been out of print before they chose to bring the Phantom back from oblivion, not had its author been forgotten. Quite the opposite. There have been multiple, international versions of the Phantom, the first of them made still during Leroux’s lifetime. He, in turn, enjoyed a long, successful career of a journalist, writer (of nearly 40 books), and adventurer, and eventually was honoured with the title of a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur. Thus, while the musical indeed transferred the focus of the narrative into dark melodrama, Leroux and his novel already had a set place on the very threshold between the waning tradition of the classic Gothic novel, and the fast-developing genre of crime fiction.

The proposed paper will explore the textual and stylistic inspirations for Leroux’s Le Fantôme, focusing on the works similarly situated on the intersection of Crime and the Gothic, ranging from Frankenstein and Dracula, through George du Maurier’s Trilby, to the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Conan Doyle connection will be especially relevant, as two important ‘further adventures’ of Sherlock Holmes featuring characters from Leroux’s Phantom were published in the 1990s: Sam Siciliano’s The Angel of the Opera (which started a wave of Gothic pastiches), and Nicholas Meyer’s The Canary Trainer.

Dorota Babilas (dr hab.), Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her academic interests include Gothic, Victorian, and Film Studies, as well as the Musical Theatre and the cultural legacy of the British monarchy. Author of over 50 scholarly articles and chapters, two monographic books (2012, 2018), and a critical re-edition of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera into Polish (2019).

Dorothea Flothow (University of Salzburg, Austria)

Crime, Gothic and the Historical Novel – The Politicised Uses of Intergeneric Features in the Mid-Victorian Age

For decades, scholars had tried to draw firm generic boundaries between historical fiction, Gothic literature and crime fiction. This echoes nineteenth-century prejudices, when Walter Scott distinguished his novels from the fantastic and outdated elements of the Gothic, and allied himself to the more prestigious form of History. More recent scholarship has increasingly highlighted the close intermingling of the three forms; and indeed, the further one delves into popular literature, the closer this relationship. In popular Victorian historical novels, crime and supernational appearances served not only to attract an audience, they helped to shape a vision of past periods and to compare the past to the present – thus confirming or questioning the political, cultural and social set-up of the Victorian Age itself.

This paper proposes to examine the role of Gothic and criminal elements in a selection of mid-nineteenth-century historical novels set in the Restoration Period (1660-1688/9), including Robinson’s Whitefriars (1844), Reynolds’s The Rye House Plot (1857) and Smith’s Rochester (1852). For Whig historians, this constituted one of the ‘darkest’ eras of English history, characterised by a dissolute king with strong absolutist and Catholic leanings. In order to confirm the moral, orderly and democratic present, authors connected the Restoration period with crime and disorder, haunted by Catholic spectres from the past. The king himself is frequently shown the company of notorious criminals and involved in their conspiracies. Though these novels have fallen out of the cannon, they offer insights into the manifold uses of crime and Gothic in Victorian popular culture.

Dr Dorothea Flothow is Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies, Salzburg University. She holds a PhD from the University of Tübingen. Her research interests include the Victorian period, historical fiction, crime fiction, and children’s literature. She has just published a study of the Restoration period in popular historiographies and is conference manager of the Historical Fictions Research Conference.

Emily Farmer (Bath Spa University, UK)

The Unsustainable Existence of Women: Excess, Decay, and Grotesquery in Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque ([2003] 2007)

The Gothic is a fruitful mode to explore the physical and cultural violence experienced by women who populate societies that have clear demarcations between genders. This is because it is a mode concerned with transgressions, and for some cultures, such as Japan’s, an inability to uphold entrenched expectations of behaviour can result in devastating consequences for those involved. To then combine Gothic inclinations with the genre of crime fiction, a genre celebrated for its capacity to extract and magnify injustices plaguing its contemporary societies, is to create deeply visceral and haunting narratives. One such narrative is Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque ([2003] 2007), a novel that intersects a crime fiction narrative with Gothic tropes of the unstable narrator, monstrous excess, and grotesque aesthetics to demonstrate that the demanding patriarchal structures of power in twenty-first-century Japan are creating uninhabitable spaces for adolescent girls and women. Kirino’s novel is particularly suited to this discussion because it is not traditional crime fiction in the sense that it does not guide us through the complexities of the crime, leading us inevitably to the truth. Instead, we as readers, are invited to consider why the characters of Yuriko, Kazue, and the novel’s unnamed narrator are driven to transgress the boundaries of acceptable behaviours and commit the crimes depicted in the narrative.

Emily Farmer has recently completed her Master’s degree in Crime and Gothic Fictions at Bath Spa University. Her final project concerned the portrayal of relationships between women and girls in the crime fiction of Japanese writer Kirino Natsuo. Accordingly, Emily is primarily interested in the interactions between gender and crime fictions, particularly the representations of female criminality. This area of research interest also extends to the portrayal of women victims and victim-survivors in true-crime texts, and thinking about how an ideological shift needs to occur in order to ensure the victims do not continue to be silenced in favour of their murderers. At this year’s Captivating Criminality conference, Emily will be sharing her research on the presence of the Gothic in Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque, and how Kirino’s use of gothic tropes such as unstable narration, excess, and an emphasis on haunting beauty, serve to magnify the increasing forms of oppression faced by adolescent girls and women in Japan.

Enakshi Samarawickrama (University of Nottingham, Malaysia)

‘All Sons Disappointed Their Fathers’: Navigating Father-Son Relationships Amid Social Pressures of Performing Masculinity, Generational Trauma, Haunting Family Secrets and the Sins of Our Fathers in the Malaysian Gangster Novel Kings of Chinatown

This paper examines the contentious and tense father-son relationships present within William Tham Wai Liang’s Malaysian gangster novel, The Kings of Chinatown. Riddled with disappointed and disappointing fathers and sons, The Kings of Chinatown is an exploration of the complexities of generational trauma and the deep familial impact of family secrets on the relationships between fathers and sons in a culture that values filial piety. The phrase ‘All sons disappointed their fathers’ is a recurring theme throughout the novel amid the overarching plot of gangster kingpins at war in the glittering city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This paper focusses on the father-son relationships between Gavin and Wong as well as between Gavin and Foo. Although Wong is Gavin’s biological father, they have a tense and distant relationship, which is in stark comparison to the camaraderie and closeness between Gavin and Foo (who is, in a sense, Gavin’s chosen father). Using a combination of Raewyn Connell’s gender order theory and concept of multiple masculinities and Michelle Balaev’s work on the pluralistic trauma theory, this paper analyses these biological and chosen family relationships by examining the male characters’ expressions of masculinities, the social pressure to conform to ideals of masculinity, how the concept of masculinity itself has a direct impact on their relationships with other men, the role of generational trauma on their relationships and themselves, and the detrimental effects of dark family secrets and the sins of fathers causing suffering for their sons.

Dr Enakshi Samarawickrama is an Assistant Professor in the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. She is interested in researching portrayals of gender in crime fiction, the power dynamics at play between femininities and masculinities and the concepts of female victimhood, violence, and agency.

Ffion Davies (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Tradition vs. Mode: Genre Hybridism in Crime Fiction

Whether existing as a police procedural television series, a dark domestic thriller film, or a journalistic true crime podcast, crime fiction continues to dominate the cultural imagination in its various manifestations despite its dubious reputation as a low-brow popular culture with little to no academic merit. Many of these iterations function within a diverse range of generic traditions. Yet, we must recognise that a set of established discursive codes are employed to allow these widely different manifestations to exist under the homologous identifier of crime fiction. It is my aim to suggest that these discursive codes are perhaps best articulated through conceptualising crime fiction not as a genre, but as a mode.

In the adjacent field of Gothic studies, it has become a critical orthodoxy to conceptualise the Gothic literary tradition as a separate entity from the Gothic mode, the more fluid iterations which exist outside a particular historical and geographical location. This distinction allows space for the more compounded nature of the Gothic, with both intertextual and intercultural complexity as well as cross-generic fluidity, and can be used to illuminate our understanding of crime fiction as both a generic tradition as well as a pervasive mode. I will argue that it is useful to consider crime writing in a manner similar to Fred Botting in his seminal text, The Gothic (1996), ‘as a mode that exceeds genre and categories, restricted neither to a literary school nor to a historical period’ (9). Like Botting’s Gothic, I will argue that crime fiction is ‘a hybrid form, incorporating and transforming other literary forms as well as developing and changing its own conventions in relation to newer modes of writing’ (9). This paper suggests that a separation between the tradition of crime fiction and crime as a mode is necessary in order to fully comprehend its generic hybridity and complexity.

Ffion Davies is a PhD student at City University of Hong Kong researching deviant masculinities and the figure of the homme fatal in early twentieth-century American crime fiction. She was awarded the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship in 2020 and has a particular interest in the study of subversions of hegemonic masculinities through Crime and Horror narratives of the twentieth century. Ffion joined the International Crime Fiction Association in 2019 and is now part of the organizational and administrative team, as well as an assistant editor of the Edinburgh University Press journal Crime Fiction Studies.

Garima Yadav (University of Delhi, India)

Witches, Wives, and Wrongdoing: Examining Intersections of Violence against Women and Gothic in Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul

Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul (2020) straddles gothic spaces of Regency Bengal, grand mansions, spectral legends, and murderous witches. This paper uses the film to demonstrate the intersections between domestic violence and retributive crime which can only exist within the narrative frameworks of the imaginary. The conformist space occupied by patriarchal structures is presented as an amalgam of feudal patriarchy fortified by western emphasis on reason. As spousal abuse becomes normative, Bulbbul’s physicality is reduced to a Foucauldian ‘docile body’ that can be altered, transformed, and desired. In Bulbbul, the true horror stems from the marriage of a five years old girl to a much older Bengali zamindar. The duality of domestic violence and abuse of women within the home as an acceptable category and the sham-demonic murders of the abusive husbands invites critical engagement. The patriarchal triad of caste-class-gender is not built to serve the women and therefore they must pretend to mutate into mythopoeic demons that can avenge the wronged women. Battery, sexual assault, adultery are independent of the feudal zamindari system of rural Bengal where both the wealthy landowners and the lowly charioteers beat their wives with the socially sanctioned impunity. However, unreliable and constantly shifting positions, the gothic element makes allowance for crime by the oppressed. The paper locates the disruptive potential of gothic narratives of retaliatory crime that encapsulates agency and liberation in contrast to patriarchal structures that foster abuse.

Garima Yadav is a Jawaharlal Nehru University alumna. An Assistant Professor working at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College (University of Delhi), her area of interest lies in gender studies, culture studies, cinema, and crime fiction. She has prepared course content for Indira Gandhi National Open University’s undergraduate papers on Postcolonial Literature and Romanticism and published papers on Indian crime fiction.

Haiqa Nowsheen and Jaya Shrivastava (National Institute of Technology, India)

‘I had stepped back suddenly’: Failed Resistance through the Lens of Unreliable Narration and Gothic Metaphor in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Healing

Narrational Unreliability (Booth, 1983; Nünning, 1999) has been a vehicle for the understanding of text beyond its semantic interpretation. Unreliability in narration uses the technique of repetition, inconsistency, and vagueness compelling the readers to understand the text against the grain and to reach the underlying motive. J. Douglas Perry Jr. in his ‘Gothic as vortex’ gives a similar structure of three interrelated principles: concentricity (repetition of events), predetermined sequence (vaguely connecting past and present), and character repetition which forms the basis of a Gothic metaphor. These principles allude to the characteristics of unreliability and bring to focus the unreliable aspects of the gothic and vice versa. As a means of highlighting the overbearing patriarchal forces, these techniques have been rendered by Gayl Jones in her novels Corregidora (1975) and Healing (1998), complicating the conventional notion of female resistance. These novels have female protagonists who fight patriarchy employing violence and healing. The characters in Corrigedora attempt to castrate men as a form of resistance, yet fail in their pursuit. The protagonist in Healing claims to be a healer in order to be equal in the societal dichotomy, but her healing powers lie only in her imagination. The pursuit of resistance seems to destroy their sanity. This paper attempts to study these novels through the lens of unreliability and gothic metaphor to highlight the author’s deliberate attempt to use these techniques in order to show the unbreachable nature of patriarchy that renders female defiance unsuccessful. The paper also explores the limitations posited by reliable narration in depicting resistance and the need to employ the grotesque to depict abuse.

Haiqa Nowsheen is a PhD Scholar from the department of English, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar (J&K India). She holds post-graduation in English Language and Literature and has presented a Conference paper on, ‘Reconstructing Citizenship to form a Gender-Neutral Perspective’ in Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS NR) Conference. Her field of interest includes African American Prison Studies.

Dr Jaya Shrivastava is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences & Management at the National Institute of Technology Srinagar (J&K, India) where she teaches English Literature and Communication Skills. Her research interests include contemporary African American Literature and Narratology. She has published research papers in reputed international journals including Asiatic, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice among others.

Heather Duerre Humann (Florida Gulf Coast University, United States)

Locating the Gothic in the Jonathan Moore’s The Dark Room

Keeping with the theme of ‘Captivating Criminality 9: Intersections of Crime and the Gothic,’ this presentation will address the degree to which The Dark Room, a 2017 crime novel by Jonathan Moore’s, relies upon elements commonly found in Gothic narratives. Indeed, Moore’s novel is exemplary of the tendency of crime (fiction) to converge with the Gothic.

In the case of this novel, which belongs to the police procedural sub-genre, the relationship between crime (fiction) and the Gothic can be seen particularly in the way transgression intersects with violence and deviance. It is in this regard that, in line with Edmund Burke’s view that Gothic fiction works to express anxieties surrounding the collapse of familial, social, and political distinctions, Moore’s novel troubles already unstable boundaries. This feature of the novel, which is brought to the foreground via narrative threads such as the one showing San Francisco’s mayor being blackmailed with incriminating photos, is further enhanced due to Moore’s use of Gothic tropes (such as a disinterred grave) and his novel’s emphasis on long-buried family secrets, another hallmark of Gothic fiction.

Dr Heather Duerre Humann is the author of four books, including Gender Bending Detective Fiction: A Critical Analysis of Selected Works (McFarland, 2017) which was chosen by the American Library Association to be included on their 2018 Over the Rainbow ‘Recommended Book List.’ Her articles and essays have also been widely published; they appear in journals, such as Clues: A Journal of Detection, and edited collections, such as The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction.

Hector Duarte Jr (Miami Dade College, United States)

Dredging the Swamp: The Murder of Christian Aguilar

In the Fall of 2012, as he was preparing for his first semester at The University of Florida, Christian Aguilar went missing. As days turned to weeks, the harrowing motivations and details regarding Christian’s death would rock the university and Aguilar’s community of friends. It would eventually come to light he’d been brutally beaten and murdered by his best friend, Pedro Bravo. Partially due to jealousies over Aguilar’s new relationship with Bravo’s ex-girlfriend. This is a first-hand account from Aguilar’s and Bravo’s middle school teacher. Reflecting on the long search, coming to grips with the too-harsh reality of the crime, and a heavy lesson the school system never imparts to educators: how to cope with losing students. In said case, literally, metaphorically, and systemically.   

Hector Duarte, Jr. is a writer/educator out of Miami, Fl, where he lives with his wife, son, and cat. His fiction has been published widely online and in print, like the recent anthologies Pa Que Tu Lo Sepas: Stories to Benefit the People of Puerto Rico, and Shotgun Honey Presents Volume 4: Recoil. In September of 2018, Shotgun Honey Books published his full-length short story collection Desperate Times Call.

Helen Goodman (Bath Spa University, United Kingdom)

Domestic Violence and Gothic Madness at the Margins of Criminality: The Law and the Coded Body from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to The Forsyte Saga

This paper investigates ways in which features of the domestic gothic genre were developed as a testing ground for debates about gender, marriage, domestic abuse, mental health, and the inconsistency with which the law intervened in such matters. The areas of madness and marriage both underwent major, hotly contested legislative changes from the 1840s to the beginning of the twentieth century, shifting the boundaries of criminality.

Following the publication of Esquirol’s Mental Maladies (in English) in 1845, sexual jealousy was pathologised as ‘erotomania’ and alcoholism came to be interpreted as another form of monomania. Alcohol as a precipitator of domestic abuse, familiar from the pages of broadsides and Newgate novels, emerged in depictions of upper- and middle-class families following Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Sexual violence ‘above stairs’ lies just beneath the surface of mid-Victorian realist narratives such as Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869), with its detection and trial structure, but emerges more explicitly in the early 1900s. In the first volume of The Forsyte Saga (1906) John Galsworthy drew attention to domestic abuse culminating in marital rape, combining  the claustrophobia of domestic Gothic novels like Bronte’s, with Newgate and sensation fiction influences, such  as the criminal trial and monomania.

The paper examines ways in which jealousy, rage, and madness are written on and in the body as clues and codes in these novels, via Braddon’s The Fatal Three (1888) and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and ‘The Second Stain’ (1904). It gives close readings of perpetrators’ and criminals’ phrenology, blood circulation, body temperature, for example, demonstrating reciprocal intersections between fictional representations and the contemporary international psychological and anatomical theories of Cesare Lombroso, C. J. Mittermaier, Charles Bell, Charles Darwin, Carl Lange, and William James. 

Dr Helen Goodman is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Bath Spa University (UK), specialising in nineteenth century literature, culture, and medicine, with a particular emphasis on mental health and gender. She completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2015, having previously studied at the University of Exeter. She has held teaching posts at New York University, Oxford, and Royal Holloway, and worked for an education charity for three years. Her publications have explored subjects including imperial masculinities in Haggard’s boys’ adventure fiction, male patients in London’s Victorian lunatic asylums, travel and masculinity, monomania and domestic violence in Victorian fiction, and emotional expression in Dickens’s early novels. Helen’s first monograph is provisionally titled ‘Nineteenth-Century Mad Men: Insanity and Masculinity in Literature, Culture, and Medicine.’

Hye-yong Jung (Kyungpook National University, South Korea)

A World of Pre-modern Bizarreness and Fantasy

The subject of this study is the Korean novel Baeksado (‘The Picture of White Serpent’) published in 1939. Baeksado is a novel depicting a female shaman who worships snakes, and a man’s maniacal love for the female shaman, and the tragic fate that the two, the man and the woman face as a result of this love. In the novel, the figure of a female shaman who is united with dozens of snakes in a dark cave, especially the figure of the female shaman with a huge white snake hanging from her neck, is grotesque and dreamy enough to cause a thrill. In this study, we try to search for the root of the horrors and dreams, bizarreness and beauty of the ‘Picture of White Serpents’ – the fantasy created by dozens of snakes wrapped around a woman’s beautiful body – which cannot be explained by modern rationality. The ‘Baek Baek Gyo (White Cult) Incident,’ which shook Korean society in the late 1930s when Baeksado was published, can be an important clue to this search. It is the case that the headmaster of ‘Baek Baek-gyo’ not only sexually assaulted numerous female followers, but also murdered and buried more than 200 members in the dark. This study focuses on the relationship between the ‘Baek Baek Gyo (White Cult) Incident’ and the creation of Baeksado, while trying to find the traces of the supernatural world that have been removed under the name of ‘civilization.’

Hye-yong Jung is a visiting professor at Kyungbook National University in South Korea, specializing in Korean literature. Her main research area is the influence and relationship between Japanese and Korean modern literature during the imperial period, and especially, the process of accepting western detective fiction in Korea during the colonial period. She is the author of ‘The Modern Literature of Illusion,’ ‘Modernity of Literature of Colonial Period,’ ‘Birth of Popular Literature,’ and ‘The Realm of Detective Literature.’ In May 2022, she published ‘Waiting For The Day, The New Springtime,’ a critical biography of Na Hye-seok, Korea’s leading New Woman in the 1920s.

Hyunhee Lee (Korea University, South Korea)

Creatures of Modern Science: Fear of Artificial Humans

Since the play of Karel Capek was published in 1920, artificial humans and robots created by the imagination of science have frequently appeared in literature worldwide. In Japan, since Capek’s plays were translated and published in 1923, many works based on artificial humans have been created mainly in the genre of detective novels. Rumi, the main character of Ran Ikujiro(蘭郁二郎)’s Artificial Romance (人造恋愛) published in 1938 in Japan, is an android, made with ‘female body.’ This study examines what characteristics were considered for the setting of ‘female body’ android and analyzes human desires and conflicts surrounding Rumi to understand how the image of an artificial human was accepted and transformed in modern period in Japan. When it is revealed that the beautiful girl Rumi is not a real human being but a created android, both protagonist Endo, who felt love for her, and the creator Morita, who thought Rumi was his own, faced huge psychological change. These psychological changes clearly show the meaning of the works of artificial humans in the background of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 and the ‘National Mobilization Law’ of April 1938 leading to World War II. This study aims to understand the transformation of the image of an artificial human that has emerged as a material for literary works along with the rapidly changing world of 1930’s.

Hyunhee Lee is Research Professor at Korea University in South Korea specializing in Japanese Modern Literature. She is the author of ‘The Scientific Imagination of the Modern Japanese Detective Novels: Focusing on Yumeno Kyusaku’s Altered Detective Stories’ and ‘A Study on the Acceptance of “Artificial Man-Robot” in the 1920s in Japan: Focusing on “Human Manufacturing (Ningen Seizou)” by Kunieda Shiro.’ She also translated Shoji Akai’s Travel and Modernism.

Isaraporn Pissa-ard (Chiangmai University, Thailand)

The Gothic and the Oriental in Blanche d’Alpuget’s White Eye

Set in Australia and Thailand, the novel White Eye (1994)by Australian author Blanche D’Alpuget revolves around a catastrophe that science can engender when it is misused by evil people. White Eye, the deadly bacteria of the title, is created out of human greed, selfishness and hunger for power. Thailand in this novel figures as a place where criminally-minded Westerners can pursue illicit activities with little inhibition. Such a depiction is reminiscent of Orientalist discourses that tend to perceive non-Western societies as closely resembling a natural world of which barbarism and violence are an intrinsic part. In Orientalist discourses, the East is often portrayed as having great potential to breed, induce or fuel evil and immorality in Westerners. The West, on the other hand, is associated with culture and civilization and its restraining layer of civilization functions to suppress primitive urges. While subscribing to a number of Orientalist assumptions, White Eye nonetheless attempts to criticise the West’s exploitation of Thailand and foreground the unequal power structure between East and West. The protagonist is an Australian scientist who ruthlessly exploits the local Thais and utilizes his scientific knowledge in a way that hurts both human and non-human beings. His characterization reminds us of a Gothic villain, who is highly driven and intelligent yet depraved and perversely obsessed. Thailand in the novel resembles a Gothic space of wilderness or an abode of evil where the antagonist freely lets loose his violent nature and commits atrocities without restraint.

Isaraporn Pissa-ard (PhD) teaches undergraduate courses in world literature, mythology and folklore, and translation at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Her research interests include comparative literature, Thai political fiction, critical folklore studies, children’s literature and literature for young adults.

Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University, China)

Dakinis and Femmes Fatales: Gendered Subversion of the Gothic in Dechen Roder’s Honeygiver Among the Dogs

Labelled ‘Buddhist noir’ in a number of reviews, Dechen Roder’s film Honeygiver Among the Dogs (2016) begins with the disappearance of a senior nun in rural Bhutan. The resulting mystery plot is replete with gothic elements, and the intrusion of the past into the present is manifest in the main female character’s connection with an ancient lineage of dakinis.  In Vajrayana Buddhism, dakinis are female deities, depictions of which are characterised by overt sexuality, whose role is to lead others to enlightenment. The film consciously connects the figure of the dakini with that of the femme fatale though the central character, a beautiful young woman named Choden. This connection is initially ambiguous, with the ostensibly positive function of dakinis undercut by fear of seduction and sense of sexual threat: the local villagers believe Choden to be a ‘demoness,’ and this in turn leads her to be suspected of the murder.  However, Honeygiver Among the Dogs subverts the trope of the femme fatale within the context of Buddhist beliefs by ultimately re-asserting the traditional esoteric and benevolent role of the dakini. The gothic intrusion of the past is central to this message in that film’s revelations situate Choden within a lineage of enlightened female deities that includes Yeshe Tsogyal (c. 8^th-9^th century CE), a major female figure in Himalayan Buddhism. Through her manipulation of gothics tropes and the femme-fatale, Roder thus asserts the importance of female religious figures to Bhutan’s Buddhist identity. 

Ivan Stacy is associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. He is author of The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction (Lexington, 2021) and has published on complicity in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Pynchon and China Miéville, as well as the television series The Wire. He is also interested in the carnivalesque, and has published articles on this theme in W. G. Sebald and contemporary Bhutanese film; he is currently editing a special issue of The Journal of Festival Culture Enquiry and Analysis on Bakhtin for the Twenty-First Century. Ivan has lived and taught in the U.K., China, South Korea, Thailand, Libya and Bhutan.

Izabela Morska (University of Gdańsk, Poland)

A Christian Woman in Distress: Hilary Mantel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

In Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, the short novel of 1988 by Hilary Mantel, the Gothic and postcolonial motives converge. Frances Shore, the protagonist, has just joined her husband in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Tempted by exorbitant salary, Andrew devotes himself entirely to his engineering work. Saudi Arabia is a junction between a dysfunctional family going global and a state run like a private enterprise. If one happens to witness an accident or a crime, it may be prudent not to report it: Witnesses go to jail. Frances who by virtue of being a woman is already held under an informal house arrest, develops an interest in the top floor apartment. The gossip has it that this is where the star-crossed lovers from an upper-class Saudi family clandestinely meet.  Andrew and other company men warn Frances against poking her nose into other people’s business. Echoes of the Bluebeard legend reverberate here; a reference to ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is evident as well (shopping by car her only entertainment, Frances is carefully guarded both by her female neighbors and malicious local boys skilled at menacing women who try to cross the street on their own). When the upper floor flat turns out to be anything but the location of lovers’ tryst, and the body is identified at last, Frances’s outlook remains bleaker than ever. No longer guided by what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism, Frances seems to merge with the city that is ‘a network of pretenses and counter-pretenses,’ self-replicating and repellingly invincible.

Izabela Morska is Professor of Literary Studies in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her interests are postcolonial literature, gothic studies, queer studies, and textual violence.  She is EIC of a niche magazine Polish Gothic.

Jaejin Yu (Korea University, South Korea)

The Fear in Modern Asia Society – Comparison of Japanese and Korean Films of Yusuke Kishi’s Black House

Yusuke Kishi’s Black House (1998), dealing with a murder for insurance money, won the 4th Japan Horror Novel Award. It is one of the representative works of the J-Horror which caused the worldwide horror boom as well as Korea. Even if this novel dealt with an insurance murder that are commonly used in mystery novels; however, Black House is read as a horror novel not as a mystery novel. The reason is that it is the first novel that depicted psychopath, a ‘monster that does not have a human heart.’ The novel Black House was filmed in Japan in 1999 and was remade in South Korea in 2007. In this presentation, I will compare the two films of Japan and South Korea, through examining how the psychopaths have been portrayed in both movies. Also, figure out what was the fear in Japan in the 1990s through the comparison of both films that filmed the crime of murder for insurance money as a horror, and how South Korea in the 2000s had its own fear. In addition, I will find the features of J-Horror, which caused horror boom in 1990s.

Jaejin Yu is Professor of Japanese literature at Korea University in South Korea. Her main research area is Japanese modern and contemporary literature (Japanese popular literature, including detective stories). She is especially interested in Japanese detective stories written by Japanese residents, who lived in the Korean Peninsula during the colonial era and in the literary works published in Japanese language non-government newspapers issued in Korea during the early colonial period.

Jan Marvin A. Goh (University of Santo Tomas, Philippines)

‘H(a)unting the Aswangs’: Urban Gothumentary, Critical Gothic Realism, and Folkloric Spectrality of Philippine ‘War on Drugs’ in Alyx Arumpac’s Aswang (2019)

An internationally acclaimed feature on the ongoing Philippine ‘War on Drugs’ was further iterated to the public sphere by Alyx Arumpac’s ‘creative documentary’ called Aswang (2019). Despite being premised on the most renowned Philippine folkloric creature called aswang, one immediately notices the absence of its physical presence in the entire duration of the ‘documentary,’ yet its essence does not only return in wake of the already committed acts of crime. It has also been transfiguring in the gestures of revelation among various systemic horrors brought upon to the urban poor. Glennis Byron and Francesca Saggini mentioned that this ‘imperative of eternal return’ is closely associated with the Gothic fiction not only by the vices and virtues of its ‘ghosts, curses, and violent eruptions of the past in the present,’ but by the gesture of salvaging ‘its own conventional narratives, strategies and motifs’ (7). 

While there are endless iterations of this return to Gothic fiction’s stylistic possession of crime fiction, this ongoing paper seeks to utilize Aswang (2019) in complicating the place of documentary, as a genre and as a mode of gazing at the subjects of criminality, toward realistic cartographies of crime that seeks to employ and produce a kind of folkloric-gothic sensibility. This project begins with a more formalist cinematic analysis of the documentary. Then, the stylistic cues from the cinematic analysis shall be used in recalibrating Aswang (2019), as a ‘Gothumentary’ (Woofter, 2016) that employs ‘gothic realism,’ not only in exploring the veracity of depicted socio-historical subjects, but also in unsettling the spectators’ epistemic boundaries of the inconclusive portrayal of the historical world through refamiliarization. Finally, this presentation concludes by reterritorializing the spectrality of aswang towards a multiplicity of figural, conceptual, and criminal aswangs that h(a)unts and are h(a)unted by the spectators.

Jan Marvin A. Goh is an Instructor from the University of Santo Tomas. He graduated with an MA in English Language Studies at University of Macau where he wrote his thesis on ecogothic, and an MA in Language and Literature in Philippines where he wrote a 400-paged post/structural auto/biography of a renowned Filipino writer. He is a member of Gothic in Asia Association (GAA) and is currently focusing on contributing to the complications of the ‘G/gothic’ from Philippine perspectives.

Jerrine Tan (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Moral Reckoning and Masculinity in Triad Films Andrew Lau’s Infernal Affairs and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed

In this paper, I look at Andrew Lau’s 2002 Infernal Affairs, and Martin Scorsese’s 2005 Hollywood adaptation, The Departed. The OED defines adaptation as the act of making (a person or thing) suitable or for a specific purpose; it can also mean to rework something to fit a new purpose or to a different context or environment. Inherent in the action of adapting, then, is the suggestion of molding the original work to become less jarring, less of itself – to smooth out its edges and sand out its kinks so as to better fit a new context. Considered from this perspective, while adaptation may facilitate a greater reach of artworks – and greater diversity and accessibility by extension – it also constitutes a loss. What are the implications when we speak of the ‘faithfulness’ of adaptations? And what might these ‘unfaithful’ changes reveal, especially in the contextual of a masculinized genre like the mob film? I examine the contextual allegorical geopolitical readings in the Hong Kong original before turning to focus on how other differences in the Scorsese adaptation in relation to characterization and narrative resolution, beyond merely adapting for setting, make visible the difference in moral calculations that reveal something about American society. I suggest that the moral reckoning the film puts forth relies on and maps onto toxic masculinity, homophobia, and heteropatriarchal values that stand in for American identity, and for which the detective/mob film serves as the perfect vehicle.

Jerrine Tan is an assistant professor in the English department at City University Hong Kong. Her scholarly essays have been published or are forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies, Wasafiri, The Cambridge Companion for Kazuo Ishiguro, and she writes regularly for public-facing platforms such as WIRED, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lit Hub among others.

Jiaying Sim (Digipen Institute of Technology, Singapore)

Access through Excess: The Somnambulist and the Scapegoat in Park Chan-Wook’s Decision to Leave

This paper attends to Park Chan Wook’s Decision to Leave (2022), a film about a detective, Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) investigating a man’s suspicious death in the mountains only to become increasingly intrigued by the man’s enigmatic wife, Seo Rae (Tang Wei), the prime suspect of the crime. Hae-joon’s struggles with sleep disorder enables him to function as a figure of the somnambulist in the film, who remains numb and desensitised to his life until Seo Rae awakens his senses and gives his life purpose. By close-reading the film’s excessive self-reflexivity in its cinematic form and aesthetics through Hae-joon’s sleepwalking, the audience is given access to the blindspots relating to the superficial appearances of events. While tailing Seo Rae for the case, Hae Joon grows increasingly obsessed with her as he shifts from first being unable to see clearly because he sleepwalks in his everyday life, to learning about his capacity for feeling through Seo Rae and the deepest secrets she keeps. However, Hae Joon’s growing interests in Seo Rae merely subjugates and limits her agency as he involves himself with her life unprofessionally, only to further bury her within the unequal societal position of which she occupies as a Chinese immigrant woman in a Korean society. Through which, Decision to Leave reveals the potential for visceral sensations in filmic experiences to comment on the obsession with a morally idealistic society that ultimately traps the central female character in the film as a scapegoat figure. 

Jiaying Sim is an assistant professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Digipen Institute of Technology, Singapore. She received her PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Glasgow, UK. Focusing on different types of body assemblages that are produced with consideration to historicity, modernity, urban spaces, race, class, gender, and sexuality, she rethinks the politics and ethics of Asian Cinemas. She has written on Asian Cinemas, art exhibition and curation, film-philosophy, and gender and sexuality on screen.

Joseph Crawford (University of Exeter, United Kingdom)

‘What form did you have?’: Warring Genres in Umineko: When They Cry

This paper discusses the Japanese Gothic crime franchise Umineko: When They Cry, which was originally published as a series of sound novels in 2007-10, and subsequently adapted into a manga series (2008-2015), an anime series (2009), and a series of novels (2009-18). In telling the story of a group of wealthy individuals with dark pasts who are murdered one by one on a remote island, Umineko pays highly self-conscious homage to Agatha Christe’s classic murder mystery And Then There Were None (1939), as well as to its Japanese imitators such as Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders (1987) and Arisugawa’s The Moai Island Puzzle (1989). However, as its narrative progresses, Umineko introduces an increasing number of Gothic supernatural elements such as witches and demons, all while challenging its reader to devise non-supernatural explanations for the increasingly-fantastical scenarios with which they are presented. Crucially, Umineko itself does not provide these answers: instead it openly confronts its audience with the choice of whether to interpret it as a work of Shinhonkaku-inspired detective fiction or a work of supernatural Gothic fantasy, and with the question of what is gained and lost with each choice. This deliberate ambiguity was highly controversial among its original audience, many of whom felt cheated by its lack of a traditional ending. In this paper I shall discuss Umineko in relation to the detective stories and visual novels it draws upon, and explore how its generic indeterminacy relates to its larger themes of gender, memory, trauma, and identity.  

Joseph Crawford is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of four books: Raising Milton’s Ghost, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism, The Twilight of the Gothic, and Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry 1825-55. His research interests include Gothic fiction, Romantic poetry, romance fiction, conspiracy theory, nineteenth-century medical cultures, and the history of popular culture. 

Joseph Mead (University of Exeter, United Kingdom)

‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…’ Sherlock Holmes as Victorian Supernatural

Sherlock Holmes, fiction’s most famous detective, is known for having perfected the detection of crime to a science: a champion of the empirical, evidence-based reasoning that grew in influence during the nineteenth century. But just as an undercurrent of the Gothic pervades many of Conan Doyle’s tales, I argue that Holmes, with his almost-superhuman feats and providential insights, is not the strictly rationalistic being he appears and relies as much on the fantastic and sensational as on cold reason. Maurizio Ascari notes, in A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, that the earliest beginnings of the detective genre can be traced to older, supernatural ideas of the dissemination of justice; during the Victorian era, with the rising influence of evidence-based reasoning, Ascari suggests this divine intervention was secularised into a human figure. Other such as Srdjan Smajic and Carl D. Malmgren have observed shifting ideas of knowledge and perception at the time and how these influenced the rise of detective fiction, while the likes of Sarah Crofton, Frank Lawrence, and Elizabeth Rose Gruner trace the origins of the detective novel into the murky waters of the Victorian Gothic and its fantastical elements. This paper will discuss the Holmes character in that light, interrogate how the character’s intellectual and moral authority is constructed in the text, and ask whether the Great Detective purely runs on the pure logic the character espouses, or whether he occupies another narrative space, a liminal existence between the scientific and the supernatural – that Holmes represents an amalgamation of empirical reason the fantastic, a not-quite-human ‘angel of reason.’

Joseph Mead is a PhD student at the University of Exeter, focusing on the history of the detective story and its relationship to the Victorian supernatural. He is also a part-time teaching assistant at a local school and writes fiction in his free time.

K.A Laity (The College of Saint Rose, United States)

Detective Instinct: Duelling Amateur Sleuths in Crimson Peak

‘Look here, Marlowe, I think I can understand your detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot, but don’t let it run away with you.’

Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (ch14)

While Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak has found a lasting appreciation amongst fans of ghosts, hauntings, and the Gothic, many overlook the art of detection at the heart of the story. While Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam) models himself on the cerebral icon, Sherlock Holmes and his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who was not immune from the desire to solve crime), Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) launches herself at problems from the probing point of view of the investigative crime writer Although her story is one ‘with ghosts in it’ Edith quickly realises that she has married not only into a crumbling aristocracy but also into profound mystery. While Sharpe’s previous marriages were quickly uncovered by the hired professional, Holly (Burn Gorman), who had access to the official paper trails, it’s a much trickier job investigating trapped inside the murderous house. For a time, it seems that McMichael’s rational pursuit and Cushing’s more emotional investigation will finally meet at the solution, but the optometrist puts all his faith in seeing the visible, just as he is confident that photography can make ghosts tangible—and fails. Edith instead relies on jumps of inspiration and her understanding of the complexity of human desires. Desire will always trump the rational because we want more than we know. In the course of my presentation I will refer both to the film and its official novelisation to unravel the two paths leading from ghosts to murder and back again.

K. A. Laity is an award-winning author, scholar, filmmaker, critic, editor, and arcane artist. Current research includes medieval Scots, crime fiction/films, and the writings of Leonora Carrington. She is Associate Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose. Full bibliography can be found at KALaity.com

Kalsang Wangmo (University of Jharkhand, India)

Is There an End to the Violence against the Depressed and the Marginalised Population in India

‘A just society is that society in which ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt is dissolved into the creation of a compassionate society’

Dr BR Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

India is a multi -cultural and a multi-lingual country with different religions, cultures and historical background. The diversity of the India is its unique feature but, on the hindsight, it also becomes key factor which leads to conflicts, disagreements and disputes arisen from the differences of opinions, choices and principles. Therefore, even after all these years of being independent country, it has been the ground for long-drawn conflicts due to diverse in religion, castes and culture. The caste system is still so prevalent in rural parts of India. The atrocities committed against the marginalised and the depressed communities have only increased in the recent past despite the educational progress and economic development in the country. The increasing trend shows a crime is committed against the depressed and the marginalised every 18 minutes. This violence is often peculiar as people belonging to these marginalised castes are beaten or even killed for trivial things, like riding a horse, or keeping a moustache, or drinking water from wells meant for the mainstream people.

The violence against these marginalised sections of the society fundamentally stems from the traditional social structure in India, which divides society into four castes. People from so-called ‘upper castes’ are presented as those with higher status, and somewhat possessing authority over those lower in the caste system. Since Dalits and Tribals don’t fall in any of those four castes, they are deemed in this system as ‘outcasts’ or ‘untouchables.’ This presentation will dwell on the community-based malpractices and violence upon the depressed and the marginalised in India exploring the social construction, historical evidences on the prejudices and discriminations which has been carried down from centuries. This will also examine the remedies taken by the authorities and the impact on the violence against marginalised populations in India.

Kalsang Wangmo is currently working as an Assistant Professor in Department of Far East Languages, Central University of Jharkhand (www.cuj.ac.in) since, 17th June, 2013. Prior to that, worked (14th July, 2008 – 21st may, 2013) as an Assistant Professor (Ad-hoc), Department of Buddhist Studies, University of Delhi (www.du.ac.in). She worked (2002-2005) for PRAGYA, an NGO, Research and Development Organization (www.pragya.org) focused on sustainable development of the Himalayan region, its marginalized communities, conservation and   promotion of language, culture and its sensitive eco-system. Managing heritage based projects on sustainable livelihood generation and promoting of eco-tourism.

Karen Budra (Langara College, Canada)

Gothic Gossip Girls: True Crime and Female Fashion

In this paper, I will explore the relationship among popular representations of crimes involving the fashioned female body, including the 18th century ‘London Monster,’ 19th century ‘Jack the Ripper,’ and the 21st century phenomenon of YouTube influencers like Bailey Sarian, who adopt Gothic trappings to showcase both their makeup skills and tales of ‘true crime.’  These narratives are accompanied using exaggerated visuals, focusing on the irresistible allure of the adorned female body.  However, while earlier true crime stories, told mostly by male writers, focus on the penetration or unveiling of the female body, the 100% female 21st century video storytellers recount their tales as they methodically—and, until the final reveal, mysteriously-cover their faces with elaborate makeup.  Bailey Sarian, whose body is tattooed with Gothic images such as flights of bats, goes so far as to create a different makeup ‘look’ for each crime.  High production values and full-frontal presentation render these videos a Gothicized Girl Chat that disguises as it reveals.  

Karen Budra has taught everything from Cult Film through Poetry, Horror Film, Gothic Literature, Theatre & Cinema History, leading field studies to New York and the UK on Theatre & Gothic tours.  Some of her papers include ‘Fire, Smoke, Snow, Blood:  Nordic Noir across the Northern Hemisphere,’ ‘The Rose Made Flesh: Goth punk and anti-Logocentrism,’ ‘Dark House of her Flesh: Mothers in 21st century Gothic Film,’ and ‘Impossible Transcendence and Gothic Music Video.’  She’s particularly interested in the Female Gothic, the numinous, music and dance, and, as a short documentary maker, in the stories people tell.

Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)

Blood, Magic and Bullets: Gothic Masculinities in Gangster Films of Kongkiat Khomsiri

Kongkiat Khomsiri’s films offer a valid commentary on the failings of traditional masculinity models in contemporary Thai cultural contexts. His nostalgic portrayals of idealised brotherhoods of the past – the domain of strong, swarthy, heterosexual, ‘manly’ males – are worlds apart from the more mainstream media representations of ‘ideal’ Thai males that privilege light-skinned, ‘soft,’ metrosexual, sensitive urbanites. Khomsiri’s men are largely the product of pre-modern Thai masculine ideologies that valued physical strength, toughness, martial arts skills, Buddhist and magical proficiency, and the notion of ‘manly’ honour. They are predominantly low-skilled lower-class men, drawn to violent professions, whether as soldiers and police officers, or – more likely – as bandits and gangsters. Once viewed as a vehicle for national pride, traditional Thai masculinity is reconstituted in the films as potentially monstrous, linked to aggression, violence, criminality, superstition, poverty, and ignorance, and yet in the nostalgic context of reminiscing over a lost past, it remains also strangely appealing.

This article discusses the construction of Gothic masculinities in the films of Kongkiat Khomsiri and the Gothic environments his men inhabit. The article focuses mainly on the director’s first and third films: Chaiya (2007) – a crime drama set against the backdrop of professional Muay Thai boxing and the crime syndicates that control it, and The Gangster (2012) – a tribute to the legendary Thai gangster Dang Bireley’s and the generation of troubled youths he inspired. The paper also briefly references Khomsiri’s second feature Slice (2009) – a socially-engaged serial-killer/revenge drama and his more recent works – Khun Phan (2016) and Khun Phan 2 (2018) – a tale of an invincible police officer fighting bandits with bullets and magic. The article argues that Khomsiri’s films resort to the Gothic aesthetics to deliver social critique and highlight an inherent bias in the way Thai society operates. They also serve as a commentary that traditional Thai masculinity models belong to the past and the ultimate failure of the films’ heroes seems to confirm that. Combining Gothic elements with unrealistic eye-candy aesthetics, Khomsiri’s films are akin to elaborate versions of dark fairy tales filled with dangers and wonders, where valiant heroes set out to save the day, only to discover that the monsters they end up fighting are themselves.

Katarzyna Ancuta is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary Gothic/Horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. Her recent publications include contributions to Film Stardom in Southeast Asia (2022), The Transmedia Vampire (2021), The New Urban Gothic (2020) and B-Movie Gothic (2018). She is the author of Where Angels Fear to Hover: Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror (2005) She also co-edited two collections – Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2016, with Mary J. Ainslie) and South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (2022, with Deimantas Valančiūnas) and three journal issues on Thai (2014) and Southeast Asian (2015) horror film, and Tropical Gothic (2019).

Katharina Hendrickx (University of Sussex, United Kingdom)

‘My handsome, psychopathic husband’: The Gothic Heroine’s Struggle Against the Toxic Man in 21st Century Domestic Noir

Situated after the financial crash of 2008, the crime subgenre of domestic noir often features multiple, unreliable female narrators and foregrounds women’s experiences of domestic spaces, sexual and domestic abuse and a limited understanding of femininity. This presentation traces the literary heritage of domestic noir starting from the Bluebeard tale to the female Gothic novel of the 19^th century and the different manifestations of the gothic heroine over the past two centuries. Resurfacing at times of significant political, social, and economic changes in Western society, the gothic heroine emerges again in domestic noir narratives. These novels present an updated version of the gothic heroine battling with the same anxieties but in today’s postfeminist and neoliberal climate, which is typically embodied by the toxic and secretive husband serving as an extension of oppressive patriarchal structures. Examining continuities and changes in the depiction of the gothic heroine and her relationship with the toxic man, this presentation will explore in what way the gothic heroine is controlled by the husband and how she experiences, negotiates and finally, escapes his control. Here, I will draw on B.A. Paris’ popular novel Behind Closed Doors (2016) showing domestic noir’s engagement with past and present feminist concerns and female gothic fiction. Domestic noir then consciously draws on the female gothic tradition and talks back at it, serving as witness to previous and recurrent trauma and revealing ongoing patterns of patriarchal structures.

Katharina Hendrickx is teaching film and media at the University of Sussex, where she has recently completed her PhD examining the crime subgenre of domestic noir, its literary heritage, popularity and readership. Katharina has published on Gothic revenge in Gone Girl as part of the special edition on domestic noir in Clues (2021) and currently, she is working on publications around readers’ engagement with domestic noir during the Covid-19 pandemic and the subgenre’s connection to the Gothic.

Kathleen Shaughnessy (University of Iowa, United States)

What Lies Beneath the Island: Sleepless Society: Insomnia’s Gothic Ghosts

The 2019 Thai television series Sleepless Society: Insomnia is classified as a thriller in which a vulnerable but determined young woman forces a community to revisit a dark event in its history. I draw on developing scholarship on Southeast Asian Gothic to argue that through the characters’ struggle to stabilize, control, uncover, or suppress the past’s resurgence in the form of its main character Aya, the show becomes a Gothic mystery. In the show, Aya and her friends travel to their childhood island community on a mission to uncover what happened the night Aya’s mother vanished after supposedly killing three people, only to encounter significant pushback from the community during their investigation. Further complicating matters is the overlap between Aya’s chronic insomnia, which has blurred the lines between her dreams and reality, and the decades-old secret that form the backbone of the island community. The show doesn’t contain overt supernatural elements, but Aya takes on an ersatz-supernatural role as the island’s ghost, a haunting inquisitorial presence from the past that continuously refuses to fade away. Coupled with intergenerational conflicts, the potential monstrosity of others that Aya’s dreams reveal, and dubious versions of truth and memory that co-exist on the island, Sleepless Society: Insomnia keeps the audience on the threshold between realities and corporealities.

Kathleen Shaughnessy is a fifth year PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa. Her research includes intersections of crime, science, and the gothic in transnational, imperial, and popular fiction.

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (University of Bamberg, Germany)

The English Country Mansion: A Gothic Locus in Golden Age Crime Fiction

Remote castles, dilapidated abbeys or manor houses honeycombed with secret passages have long been recognised as one of the more recognisable generic hallmarks of the Gothic novel. They imbue us with a feeling of subtle terror and we are thrilled to explore them alongside the heroine or suffer her imprisonment in them together with her. Yet, this staple of Gothic writing – the isolated house – is equally important in crime fiction, especially in English Golden Age crime fiction of the interwar period. While we might find fewer remote castles or abbeys in crime fiction, we find a variety of manor houses frequented by weekend house parties that often end in murder. Once the (first) victim appears, the house becomes as isolated as the typical gothic mansion. As the locus of the crime, it becomes a character of its own; it harbours a criminal and usually a group of suspicious individuals who all have something to hide – literary or figuratively. 

This paper will examine how the manor house in Golden Age crime is both a Gothic place and not a Gothic place by showing that although the mansion of the typical country house mystery fulfils most of the criteria of a Gothic house, it has a decidedly different ‘feel’ to it. Or does it? To do so, Margery Allingham’s Black Dudley (The Crime at Black Dudley), Agatha Christie’s Styles (The Mysterious Affair at Styles) and Gladys Mitchell’s Chaynings (Speedy Death) – incidentally all settings of the very first crime novel of their respective authors – will be analysed as to their Gothic potential.

Dr Kerstin-Anja Münderlein is a research assistant and post-doc at the Department of English Literature at the University of Bamberg and an assistant editor of Crime Fiction Studies. Among other topics, she has worked on Gothic and Gothic parody, trauma in the poetry of the Great War, and socio-political criticism in Star Trek fanfiction, and is currently working on her post-doc project on gender representation in Golden Age and Neo-Golden Age Crime Fiction. Her PhD dissertation Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody: Framing the Subversive Heroine (Routledge, 2022) focused on the topic of female normatisation in the Gothic novel versus the Gothic parody. She is currently co-editing an essay collection on transgressive Gothic, Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality: New Directions in Gothic Studies (Routledge, forthcoming, together with Sarah Faber) and the conference proceedings of Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities (UP of Bamberg, forthcoming). Since 2022, she has served on the jury of the Annual Book Award of the International Crime Fiction Association and has been an associate editor on Crime Fiction Studies.

Kristin M. Franseen (Concordia University, Canada)

‘Then came that terrible rumour’: Gothic Musical Crimes in 19^th-Century Popular Fictions about Antonio Salieri

The nineteenth century saw both the proliferation of what musicologist Melanie Unseld deems ‘the literary-biographical concept’ in writings about historical composers (2014) and the development of crime fiction and related literary genres. A concern with the seeming (dis)connections between morality and genius inspired multiple fictions across the long nineteenth century, from Hoffmann’s prototypical troubled genius Johannes Kreisler (1813-1822) to the Beethovenian title character in Rolland’s monumental Jean-Christophe (1904-1912).  This presentation considers nineteenth-century literary perspectives on the mythology surrounding Salieri’s alleged rivalry with Mozart through two lesser-known examples, both of which blend biographical details (and dubious gossip) from music history with Gothic plots centered around the unveiling of past crimes and secret identities.

Gustav Nicolai’s Der Musikfeind (The Enemy of Music, 1835) presents opera itself as a corrupting, quasi-demonic force in the lives of those who create and perform it, while Walter Thornbury’s ‘The Old Chapel-Master’ (1873) explores the temptations of plagiarism as a crime analogous to murder. Unlike the far more famous interpretations of the legend found in Pushkin’s ‘Mótsart i Sal’yéri’ (1830) and Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979), neither Nicolai nor Thornbury directly depict Mozart as a character, instead situating their stories within Salieri’s later teaching career. I argue that this framing (1) reacts to changing depictions of Salieri in (mostly nonfiction) biographies of his students during this period and (2) anchors the sensational and criminal elements of each story, with questions of historical truth and philosophical debates about genius and envy both relegated to secondary concerns.

Kristin M. Franseen is a FRQSC postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, where she is also a research associate with the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. Her research on gossip and the histories of queer musicology and musical fictions appears in Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, the Journal of Historical Fictions, and the Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique. Her monograph Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson is forthcoming from Clemson University Press. She is in the preliminary stages of a new project on narratives of canonicity, collegiality, identity, and influence in Antonio Salieri’s literary reception history.

Laura Major (Achva Academic College, Israel)

The Holocaust as Deus ex Machina: Excessive Gothic in The Crow Girl

The Crow Girl (2017) follows many of the conventions of Scandinavian crime fiction or Nordic Noir: a female heroine, police procedural, and critique of the inadequacies of the welfare state, gender politics, and state institutions. To say that the novel also does not shy away from dealing with controversial and dark topics – including child sexual abuse and pornography, and even cannibalism, torture, and castration – would be an understatement. Despite its bestseller status, it is a novel with many flaws, including sensationalism and gratuitous and extreme violence. My focus in this talk, however, is on the use of the Holocaust as a deus ex machina plot device. Just as a god would swoop onto the stage in Greek tragedy to solve an intractable problem, the deus ex machina in The Crow Girl – a Holocaust survivor who turns out to be a cannibalistic transgender arch-villain – is as contrived, and is a highly unbelievable and problematic solution to the novel’s many plot issues.

Scandinavian crime fiction often probes the existence of evil, asking ‘why we still meet so much unexplained badness and tragedy in spite of our best efforts to build up a just welfare society…’(Saarinen 2003), but reversing victim and perpetrator as this novel does, and locating much of that evil in the ultimate figure of the other seems to be escaping an honest probing with the question of evil and a dependence on ancient stereotypes and scapegoats. Although the novel is filled with shocking elements, the way in which the Holocaust is used surpasses some of the other taboos tackled in the novel. Or, perhaps, the overreliance on the shock factor lays the grounds for the attempt to use the Holocaust as a plausible plot resolution.

Laura Major (PhD) is a lecturer at Achva Academic College in Israel and Hemdat Academic College in the field of Literature. She recently finished her term as Head of the Forum for English Department Heads in Israel. Her research interests include women’s narratives, crime fiction, spiritual narratives, pedagogy, and Holocaust Literature.

Laurence Talairach (University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France)

Sensational Forensic Evidence: Wilkie Collins’s Haunting Corpses

As has often been argued, Victorian sensation fiction secularised the Gothic whilst simultaneously participating in the rise of detective fiction. Wilkie Collins’s novels, in particular, featured crimes and criminals as well as amateur and professional detectives. His Gothic aesthetics, moreover, sometimes hinged upon corpses which needed to be identified by medical or legal professionals. Whether sublime or horrifying, Collins’s cadavers are time and again examined to fix the victim’s identity: photographs are taken before burial and chemicals used to arrest decomposition so that the truth may be revealed. However, as staple ingredients of the Gothic, Collins’s dead bodies also function as haunting remains from the past able to prevent closure. This is why this paper will examine moments when forensic science intersects with the Gothic to fix the identity of the corpse. To do so, it will compare and contrast the rotting corpses found in Mad Monkton (1855) and The Haunted Hotel (1878) with dead bodies exposed at the Morgue, as featured in The Woman in White (1860), or examined by experts, as in ‘I Say No’ (1884). As I will show, by foregrounding cadavers which are not always legible and refuse to become the object of the detective’s gaze, Collins offered a critical insight into the emerging culture of surveillance and the growing use of the detective paraphernalia, from fingerprint technology and forensic profiling to crime photography.

Laurence Talairach is Professor of English Literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and associate researcher at the Alexandre-Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology (Paris). Her research interests cover medicine, life sciences and English literature in the long nineteenth century. She is the author of 5 monographs (Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764–1897 (University of Wales Press, 2019); Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture (Palgrave, 2014); Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2009); Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction (Ashgate, 2007)), and has edited two novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Thou Art the Man [1894] (Valancourt Books, 2008) and Dead Love Has Chains [1907] (Valancourt Books, 2014), as well as several collections of articles on the interrelations between science and literature and the popularisation of science in the nineteenth-century.

Leonie Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

‘She Gets You Through the Phone’: Criminal Commodities and Communications Technologies in the Techno-Animism of One Missed Call (2003)

Crimes are rarely committed without the aid of objects. In Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, a schoolgirl is eaten by a piano; in Edogawa Rampo’s ‘The Human Chair,’ a man climbs into a chair to assault hotel guests; and in Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, a director has his eyes removed by a stereo – to name a few.

Joining this Gothic linage of literal accessories to murder are the haunted mobile phones of Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call. In the film, telephones are framed – quite literally – as criminal commodities that appear to move and mutilate of their own accord. First, my paper situates this within the late-capitalist reification of Japanese indigenous spirituality known as techno-animism – that is, the symbolic animation of technology in a commercial context. Animism, here, is a system of knowledge that conflates the traditional values of Shinto with the neoliberal doctrine of ‘progress’ – a potentially radical shift in human–object relations that, in the hands of capitalist developers, becomes a recipe for conservatism encoded into the machine.

The paper then demonstrates that ‘supernatural’ narratives involving animist commodities have become mundane in contemporary times due to the animating potential of communications technologies. This is surveillance capitalism as soothsayer – the harbinger of overdetermined futures in which user behaviour is not only profiled based on past experiences but manipulated to influence future ones. The techno-animism of One Missed Call thus marks a turn towards haunting futures, rather than a haunted past, as the defining feature of object-orientated Gothic Crime narratives in contemporary Japan.

Leonie Rowland is a NWCDTP-funded PhD candidate with the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, researching commodity animism in the Japanese Gothic. Her work can be found in Japanese Horror Culture: New Critical Approaches, Fantastika Journal, The Dark Arts Journal, and is forthcoming in The Gothique II.

Li-hsin Hsu (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)

Gothic Hospitality and Blood Gold: Gift-Giving and Criminal Circulation in The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (2017)

The paper proposes to look at the gothicization of gift-giving and the circulation of crime in the award-winning Taiwan crime movie The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (Xie guan yin / ‘Guanyin in Blood’) in 2017, exploring the complex relationship among the politics of (in)hospitality, the circular narrative of detective fiction, and the cinematic representation of ‘black gold’ (hei jin) related gangster politics in an Asian context. As a widow of General Tang, a commander of the post-war Kuomintang (Chinese nationalist) troops in Myanmar and Thailand, and an antique dealer in southern Taiwan, the main character Madam Tang uses artefact collection, bestowal of jewelry and objects, and high society gatherings to cover up her subterraneous network of money laundry and real estate business across Southeast Asia. The display / spectacle of hospitality, embodied in the lavish banquets, feats and festivities in the movie, and the (re)production and exchange of human bodies, commodities, and artworks, plays a central role in the underworld transaction and transmission of capital investment and insider information, and the brutal enactment of murder, rape and revenge. Furthermore, the film utilizes trans-medial, multi-lingual (Mandarin, Japanese, Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese) narrative frameworks, intermingling Taiwanese folk ballad (liām kua), contemporary tabloids and paparazzi culture, indigenous (Bunun, Puyuma and Amis) music, and religious and traditional practices, such as Shingon Buddhist chanting, classical Chinese calligraphy, and necrogamy ceremony (ming hun / ghost marriage), in order to destabilize the linear progression of the crime narrative, while accentuating the multi-ethnic complicity (as well as perspectival complexity) of the political corruption and violence across class and race in Taiwan. Drawing on the duplicitous nature of host / hostage dialectic, as has been discussed by Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and the like, the presentation hopes to examine the motif of hospitality in the movie through the gothic lens, in order to illuminate the entangled relationship between gift-giving and crime narrative in a southeastern Asian context.

Li-hsin Hsu is Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include Emily Dickinson studies, Romanticism, Transatlantic studies, Transpacific studies, Orientalism, and Ecocriticism. She has published in a number of international journals, such as The Emily Dickinson Journal, Concentric, Romanticism, and Studies in American Fiction. She has guest-edited journal issues on Gothic-related topics, including a special issue on ‘Asian Gothic’ for The Wenshan Review (June 2023) with Dr Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand), and a special issue on ‘EcoGothic Asia: Nature, Asia, and the Gothic Imagination’ for SARE (July 2022). She has also contributed to a number of edited volumes, such as Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class, Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), on topics related to Gothic spaces.

Linda Ledford-Miller (Independent scholar)

The ‘Literary Noir’ of Emily St. John Mandel’s Early Novels

Emily St. John Mandel is best known for her dystopian novel, Station Eleven (2014), made into a limited series on HBO Max in late 2021. She is the author of six novels, with The Glass Hotel (2020) and Sea of Tranquility (2022) following Station Eleven. Prior to her fame as the inadvertently prescient author of a novel on how art can serve to survive a devastating pandemic, Mandel published three novels with a small press (Unbridled) without the marketing budget to vigorously promote them. Though they have since been reissued with a larger publisher (Vintage), Last Night in Montreal (2009), The Singer’s Gun (2009), and The Lola Quartet (2012) had a lukewarm and negligible reception. All three novels have been called ‘literary noir,’ ‘noir thrillers,’ and examples of suspense.  Though she was disappointed with the critical and financial reception of her first three novels, ‘her bigger concern was getting pigeonholed as a crime writer’ (Waldman, New Yorker, 1 April 2022).

Mandel’s shift away from crime fiction to other genres serves to solidify her as a ‘genrefier,’ a writer who sees ‘in genre a revitalizing force’ (Rothman, New Yorker, 6 Nov. 2014). Her first three novels contain many of the tropes of crime fiction, including the private detective (Last Night in Montreal), the murder (The Singer’s Gun), and the mystery of identity (The Lola Quartet), while exploring the weight of the past on the unfolding of events in the present, and perhaps even the future.

Linda Ledford-Miller has a Masters in Comparative Literature from the Pennsylvania State University, and in Luso-Brazilian literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where she also earned her PhD in Comparative Literature, specializing in Literature of the Americas. She has published widely on travel writing and women writers. An avid reader of mysteries, she has shifted focus to crime fiction. She is a member of the Book Review team for Crime Fiction Studies and serves as Coordinator for the International Crime Fiction Association Annual Book Prize. 

Linnie Blake (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

From the Kwangiu Uprising to the Corporatized Present: The South Korean Serial Killer, Neoliberal Gothic and the Time Slip Phenomenon

Between 1986 and 1994 the South Korean serial killer Lee Chun-Jae perpetrated numerous sexual assaults on women and young girls, fifteen of whom he murdered. The statute of limitations having expired by the time Lee confessed his crimes (following his 1994 conviction for the murder of his sister-in-law) he was never tried for these offences and his victims never received the justice they deserved. A simulacrum of that justice would be found, however, in a number of films and television dramas – most notably Memories of Murder (2003), Confession of Murder (2012), Gap-dong (2014), Signal (2016) and Tunnel (2017). Each of these is inspired by the Hwaseong murders and each, intriguingly, depicts the thwarted quest for justice as a means of exploring South Korea’s recent history. Specifically, this paper argues, these texts’ preoccupation with memory and their deployment of Science Fiction’s ‘time slip’ convention evokes the nation’s political evolution from the 1980s to the present: from a repressive military dictatorship legitimated by the military and financial might of the United States to an economically buoyant and ostensibly democratic participant in the global free market.

This paper will explore, therefore, the ways in which films and television representations of the crimes of Lee Chun-Jae engage with Korea’s economic and cultural evolution since the 1980s. It will trace, moreover, the ways in which the highly Gothic figure of the serial killer facilitates a critique of the social and psychological cost of neoliberalisation – specifically in terms of social polarisation, escalating inequalities and the erosion of democratic governance itself. 

Dr Linnie Blake is Founder of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. She works predominantly on filmic and televisual deployments of the Gothic as a means of social and economic critique in the age of neoliberal economics.

Louie Jon A. Sánchez (University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines)

Gothic and Revenge in Philippine Teleseryes

One of the enduring themes of the ever melodramatic and romantic teleserye [tele (TV) + serye (series), the Filipino soap opera] is revenge. Revenge, as culturally understood, is as much as classical peripeteia or the reversal of fortune, as well as a moment of reckoning when justice is finally and affectively served, not only for the fictional aggrieved, but for audiences who must find the moment satisfying. In this essay, I will cursorily explore the local concept of revenge, first philologically and then through Philippine literature and popular culture. Next, I will use the concepts and ideas yielded to examine revenge as depicted in selected teleseryes over the years. I will argue that satisfaction oftentimes necessitates violent depiction – blood and gore, assumed to be much deserved by antagonists for all the gruesome and ultimately criminal suffering and evil they have caused in the story. This depiction, I will assert, necessarily turns towards the gothic, as part of the Philippine serial drama tradition’s constant didactic explications and worldview, not only of virtue and human action, but also of socio-political affairs and crisis.

Louie Jon A. Sánchez is an Associate Professor of Broadcast Communication at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines Diliman. He has been writing on Philippine popular culture, television, and the teleserye, the Filipino soap opera.    

Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko (University of Warsaw, Poland)

The Gothicised Storyworld of the Versus Narratives

The Whitechapel murders spawned a plethora of journalistic and fictional accounts, out of which an extensive Ripperature were born. It often aestheticizes these historic crimes, enforcing violence against women and enhancing the myth of the killer. It also combines serial killer narratives with such fictional tropes as the mad doctor, the detective’s doppelgänger, or the monstrous Other. Irrationality, violence, and monstrosity are also features of the Gothic, and, according to Max Dupperay (2012), the 1888 case discourse is ‘a neo-Gothic leftover in itself’ (168). While seemingly different, Gothic and (proto)detective fiction were being combined already by such writers as Ann Radcliffe or Edgar Allan Poe. My presentation deals with what I have labelled the versus narratives, meaning texts in which Sherlock Holmes is fighting (or otherwise engaging) the so called ‘Jack the Ripper.’ To some extent, with the Whitechapel killer as a Gothicised villain, the versus narratives bring the readers back to the aforementioned original proto-detective stories, with the killer sometimes presented as the shadow of the detective, hunting him (cf. Clare Smith 2016). Building on Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of storyworlds (2013), I will focus on the hybrid storyworld of versus narratives, which combines Doylean and Ripperean paradigms, both of which feed on Gothic characteristics. Deeply immersed in the imaginary Victorian London imbued with visually appealing Gothicising tropes (and sometimes offering a Gothicised supernatural explanation of the case), it (re)creates the neo-Gothic geographies of Victorian London and Victorian crime.

Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. She is the organiser of the Framing (Serial) Killing: Changing Narratives conference (November 2022) and coordinator of the From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria research group which examines 18th- and 19th-century literature and culture as well as their rewritings. Her main research area is contemporary re-imaginings of Victorian villains and detectives, historic and fictional. Currently, she is working on a book entitled Holmes and the Ripper: Versus Narratives on texts in which Sherlock Holmes is fighting (or otherwise engaging) the so called ‘Jack the Ripper.’

M. Ramakrishnan (Central University of Jharkhand, India)

The Handling of Crime and Revenge in Literary and Film Genres in South India

In the actantial model proposed by A. J. Greimas, which is based on the suggestion by Vladimir Propp, the Russian formalist and author of Morphology of the Folktale (1928) and the Theory and History of Folklore (1949), the opponent is occupying a prominent place, and it is the one that sets the narrative trajectory for all other actants. While going through some of the oral and written literature as well as watching action-packed revenge-type movies, crime and revenge is an interesting theme, and moreover, in many of the cases, the theme played a successful role in making the films more popular and successful. However, the literature and movies that deal with crime and revenge tend to create a kind of mindset among the readers or viewers that displays a degree of justification towards the punishment of the villain carried out by the protagonist. There must be a discussion on the nature and role of crime as well as the nature of the punishment. This study, focusing on Tamil folk tales, Tamil social ballads, and some of the written literary texts in Tamil and popular movies produced in the Tamil film industry, explores the nature of media reality in the handling of the theme which is highly relevant in the modern context. And also, this study incorporates the events of crime and punishment that happen in real-life situations for discussion.

M. Ramakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Folklore, in the Department of Tribal Studies, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, Jharkhand (India). He received academic degrees from St. Xavier’s College, Tamil Nadu, MPhil and doctoral Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and post-doctoral from Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai. He is also the recipient of the Presidential Award for Young Scholar in Classical Tamil.

Mariaconcetta Costantini (G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy)

Arctic Crimes and Ecogothic Anxieties in Fortitude: Rethinking the Roles of Humans and Nature in the Late Anthropocene

The recent popularity of ecoGothic across the media is certainly due to the fact that ‘the Gothic seems to be the form which is well placed to capture [climate change and environmental damage] anxieties’ (Smith and Hughes, 2013). The Arctic, in particular, has become a recurrent setting for apocalyptic narratives, films and TV series centred on the effects of global warming. A telling example is the British TV series Fortitude (2015-18). Set in the subarctic fictional town of Fortitude, the series is characterized by special intersections of crime and the Gothic, which convey dark ecological messages. The aim of my paper is to analyse these intersections and show how they change across the three seasons, becoming vehicles for different ecocritical and philosophical concerns.

In ways similar to a Nordic noir, Fortitude opens with a whodunit plot revolving around mysterious murders that upset the local community and are investigated by a Scotland Yard detective. At the end of the first season, however, the crime storyline is interrupted by the emergence of an unsettling truth: the discovery that the killings were committed by unsuspected citizens, including children, who were infected by the toxin of prehistoric parasitic wasps revived by the thawing of ice. This ecoGothic explanation reveals that the supposed wilful murders are, instead, instinct-driven actions that are not accountable as crimes, as they are parts of a biological process that precedes the invention of human ethicality and the enforcement of ‘law and order’ policies. Crime resurfaces in the second and third seasons, which pivot around the brutal deeds committed by a shaman and a pharmaceutical company. The Gothic is here used to highlight the horrific combination of hubris, greed and cruelty that turns humans into monsters capable of killing and torturing their fellow beings.

After examining these intersections of crime and the Gothic in detail, my paper will offer a reflection on the ecocritical and philosophical meanings conveyed by the two combined forms. First of all, I intend to demonstrate that, by adopting a specific ecoGothic approach that deflates the Nordic noir storyline, the first season raises ecological issues in line with circulating climate change anxieties. In the following two seasons, the combination of crime elements and Gothic paraphernalia poses pressing ethical questions about the damage caused by the ideological dominance of anthropocentrism, inviting us to rethink of the roles of humans and nonhumans in the late Anthropocene.

Mariaconcetta Costantini is professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). Her research primarily focuses on Victorian literature and culture, with a special interest in the Gothic, the sensation novel and crime fiction. She has also worked on neo-Victorian literature and postmodern Gothic culture. She is the author of six monographs, numerous journal articles and book chapters, and has edited collections of essays. She has recently published two articles on the themes of pandemics and Gothic contagion: ‘Pandemics, Power, and Conspiracy Theories’ (Critical Quarterly, 2020) and ‘Polar Contagion: Ecogothic Anxiety across Media in the Twenty-First Century’ (Lingue e Linguaggi, 2021). Since 2007 she has been IGA executive. She co-organized the international conference ‘Captivating Criminality 6: Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fiction’ (2019).

Marie Vozdova (Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic)

L. T. Meade and Supernatural Elements in the Process of Detection

Despite being well-known for writing children’s books, L.T Meade made an impact also with her crime fiction stories. Publishing at the turn of the 20th century in magazines like The Strand, Meade is one of the authors whose works show the influence that other genres had on crime fiction of the era. Among the features that reflect how loose were the boundaries of crime writing at the time is the prominent use of supernatural elements in her fiction. In particular, it is the case of the stories connected with the Oracle of Maddox Street, Miss Diana Marburg. Short stories such as ‘Finger Tips,’ ‘Sir Penn Caryll’s Engagement,’ and ‘The Dead Hand,’ all published in 1902 in Pearson’s Magazine, were written in cooperation with Robert Eustace, and they portray a detective figure whose skills rely on the supernatural.

The aim of the paper is thus to explore what role do these elements play in the search for the solution of the mystery, and the narrative as a whole. It shows how the process of detection, despite being traditionally seen as a purely rational act, combines with the intuitive and highly irrational practice of occult arts. Furthermore, it becomes a useful tool in the hands of the detective and the necessary means to uncover the whole truth.

Marie Vozdova is a Czech PhD student of English and American Literature at Palacky University’s Department of English and American Studies. The main focus of her research is detective fiction, especially the Golden Age era, which is analysed through the lens of the narratological approach. Furthermore, she is concerned with the analysis of intertextuality in the Golden Age detective novels in the context of British and world literature.

Matthew Gurteen (University of Huddersfield, UK)

Removing the Romance from Mr Rochester: How Jane Eyre’s Hero Becomes a Gothic Murderer in Adaptation

In a recent article, Sarah E. Fanning argues that ‘concepts of a ‘sensitised’ and internalised form of masculinity are infiltrating contemporary adaptations of the Brontës.’ Fanning notes how authors have changed two of the Brontë sisters’ infamous male protagonists, Heathcliff and Edward Rochester, in recent film adaptations to suit contemporary feminist concerns. Although this internalisation is correct regarding some adaptations, it is not true across all. Instead, in this paper, I explore the murderous adaptation of Edward Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I argue that texts such as Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Bella Ellis’s recent The Vanished Bride (2019) contribute to an opposing externalisation of Rochester’s masculinity. The male protagonist, I contend, thus transforms into a criminal antagonist as he becomes a murderer with distinct Gothic qualities. I explore these qualities and highlight how and why crime and the Gothic converge in these adaptations. I analyse the continued relationship between Jane Eyre, crime fiction, and the Gothic through these liminal textual spaces to comment on modern external Gothic expressions of masculinity. This paper is relevant because it contributes to a broader understanding of masculinity in contemporary society. Only through examining Rochester’s manhood’s internalisation and externalisation can we understand and challenge modern external expressions of gender such as toxic masculinity.

Matthew Gurteen is in the second year of his PhD at the University of Huddersfield. He studies true local crime in the nineteenth century, and he is particularly concerned with how authors negotiate regional identity across adaptations – or ‘revivals’ – of these crimes and their perpetrators in journalism and fiction. He has presented at several conferences, including the recent International Crime Fiction Association’s conference in Bamberg, Germany, and has been published online in blogs such as the Journal of Victorian Culture.

Maysaa Jaber (University of Baghdad, Iraq)

Women as Black Angels in Cornell Woolrich’s Noir Fiction

Cornell Woolrich’s fictional world is full of violence, paranoia, and dangerous women. His work combines suspense with crime mysteries and adds an element of horror to the noir formula of his fiction. Woolrich’s narratives create a claustrophobic noir world where characters are often wrongly accused of crimes or get entrapped in calamities and eventually face compromising troublesome situations. Woolrich’s female characters are dangerous femmes fatales who do not hesitate to commit murder to fulfil their agenda. Although women in books such as The Bride Wore Black, The Phantom Lady and The Black Angel are lethal and ruthless, they inevitably lose, like their male counterparts. Woolrich establishes the trope of his female characters as black angels; that is, they are relentless in seeking justice and revenge often blurring the lines between the two. As black angels, female characters – such as Julie Killeen in The Bride Wore Black who seeks revenge for her husband’s murder only to discover that that she murdered the wrong men, and Alberta Murray in The Black Angel who wants to save her husband from the electric chair but finds herself in love with the real murderer – are seemingly defending their homes, standing up for justice but ultimately, they get caught up in a violent world and face the futility and inescapability of failure. Hence, with an overall sense of fatalism that venges on absurdity, Woolrich’s narratives set these female characters – the femmes fatales – in impossible situations that blur the distinctions between revenge and justice, good and evil, and right and wrong.

This paper will examine Woolrich’s representations of the women as black angels, as self-sacrificing but vengeful and duplicitous women who are also ruthless killers. It will be argued here that these representations mirror and simultaneously challenge the turbulent political time in the US during the Second World as well as the shift in the gender dynamics at that time. Through the depiction of women as black angels, Woolrich’s narratives become a vehicle to express this very sense of insecurity and anxiety and the need to both articulate and subvert the pressing need for order and control particularly in relation to women. This paper will also illustrate that Woolrich’s black angels are complex creations that are part and parcel of the recipe of sex, paranoia and violence that fill pages of Woolrich’s noir novels, and it is this recipe that destabilizes both gender norms and legal codes as far as the portrayal of female criminality is concerned. 

Maysaa Jaber completed her PhD in English and American Studies from the University of Manchester, UK in 2011. Her doctoral work examined literary representations of criminal femmes fatales in American hardboiled crime fiction in relation to medico-legal work on criminality, gender, and sexuality. Now she is a lecturer at the University of Baghdad where she teaches different modules on literature to undergraduate and postgraduate students. She was a fellow in The University of Massachusetts Boston from September to November 2013, and the recipient of fellowship in the International Visitor Leadership Program in the US in 2017. She published with Palgrave, Cambridge Scholars, The Arab World English Journal, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, The Canadian Review of American Studies, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Her first manuscript The Criminal Femmes Fatales in American Hardboiled Crime Fiction came out in 2016 with Palgrave Macmillan. 

Ming Panha (Thammasat University, Thailand)

A Dreadful-looking Creature: Uncanny Recognition of Interspecies Kinship at the Time of British Imperial Decline in ‘The Adventure of The Crooked Man’ (1893) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

After Indian Rebellion in 1857–1858, various Victorian Gothic fictions, such as Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, feature either mysterious Indian characters or racist history of the mutiny. In the late nineteenth century, when the British public was rife with racial degeneration anxieties and fears of foreign invasion, ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle follows the post-Rebellion tradition and adds the fear of racial decline in the form of a malformed British soldier turned into a snake charmer after his mission in the Indian Rebellion.

This research paper argues that, even though the short story still represents India as a space of cruelty and the cause of British degeneration, ‘The Crooked Man’ asks its readers to look beyond the racist, ableist, and anthropocentric fears of the crooked man’s companionship with his mongoose, and recognise the familiarity in the unfamiliar and the possibility of making bond with the racialised other, as Holmes recognises the similarity of mongoose, a mysterious Indian creature of which the footprints puzzles him, and stoat, a British farmland creature. This paper argues that, in the lens of Donna Haraway’s companion species, this short story has a potential to revise Victorian domesticity by embracing multispecies cohabitation, and question British imperial power, even though it still reproduces Orientalist stereotypes.

Ming Panha is Lecturer in English Literature, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University. He has just recently completed his PhD study in English Literature at University of Sheffield. His thesis deals with pet dogs, masculinity, and imperialism in Sherlock Holmes fictions by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is interested in the intersection of Victorian studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and nonhuman studies.

Mona Raeisian (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany)

Of Monsters and Medical Professionals: An Analysis of Medicine and Liminality in American Police Procedural Fiction

American police procedural fiction has a great affinity with medical spaces, events, entities, and jargon. Medical doctors or individuals with medical backgrounds occupy both the spaces of villainy and heroism frequently in American police procedural. If only because of the events in the morgue, these narratives often portray a macabre and at times grotesque element in association with medical professionals. In Police Procedural, medicine meets monstrosity and madness at a juncture that is decidedly gothic. There is an eerie resemblance both in method and madness between the medical professionals in police procedural fiction and characters such as Henry Jekyll, Victor Frankenstein and even the semi-fictional entity of Jack the Ripper. This resemblance lies in the preoccupation of both narrative forms with the liminal, border crossing, abject nature of medicine as a science. Medicine is the science that crosses borders in an often-uncomfortable manner. In medical spaces private becomes public, inside infringes upon the outside world (and vice versa), the person becomes the patient, death, birth and all the in-between states occur. Medicine when looked at with the same analytic gaze it applies to human bodies becomes heroic and abominable all at once. This paper attempts to analyze the status of medical professionals as characters within police procedural fiction and to create a connection between the modern representations and their gothic antecedents on the axis of this liminality.

Mona Raeisian is a PhD student in American Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. She has dual bachelor’s degrees in English Literature and English Translation Studies and a master’s degree in English Literature. Her dissertation is titled ‘The Rumpelstiltskin Effect: Identity and Ideology in Contemporary American Police Procedural Fiction.’ Her research focuses on the ideological construction of hero, victim, and villain narrative identities in relevance to U.S. ideologies of capitalism and individualism. Her research interests include but are not limited to identity studies, ideology, capitalism and economic equality, body studies, and popular culture.

Monika Vecerova (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)

Gothic or Anti-Gothic? The Naturalist Monster in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)

When Richard Wright published his novel Native Son in 1940, the story of a twenty-year old Black man named Bigger Thomas living in Chicago in the 1930s United States sparked immediate controversy among Black American thinkers, including James Baldwin who wrote a 1955 counter-nonfictional collection of essays to further discuss his take on racial prejudice and discrimination as opposed to Wright’s writing choices in Native Son. While Wright’s novel presents an example of literary naturalism and was inspired by true crime narrative, its depiction of brutal murders of the main protagonist to great extent corresponds with literary strategies of the Gothic story, including its more suitable classification as an anti-gothic novel. The paper references Elizabeth Young’s study Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor when arguing that just as the tale of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Native Son signals both the ‘monster and monster-maker’; that is the interchangeable relationship where Bigger Thomas plays the role of the monster while the United States signifies both the monster-maker and the monster itself. Due to the nature of the genre of the text, the novel is not a Gothic tale per se; however, gothic elements are interwoven within the story and influence textual interpretation and receivers’ reception. To explain, American gothic narratives reference taboo subjects and repressed instincts which American society has deemed as dirty and deeply suggestive, paralleling thus its social stratification and consequently developed socioeconomic system built on capitalism and systemic discrimination of minority groups within said American society. Therefore, the more contemporary gothic reflections in Native Son contain fear of the Black body and stereotypes dating back to the times of slavery tied to Black men regarded as sexually aggressive, endangering the purity of the white race. The internal struggles of the protagonist present an inward view into the creation of the monstrous identity. Consequently, the paper shares James Smethurst’s view in declaring the novel as anti-gothic based on the harmful characterization of Black American communities which needs to be revised and abandoned.

Monika Vecerova is a PhD candidate at the Department of English and American studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her main research interests are twentieth-century African American crime fiction and trickster discourse combined with gendered racism and postcolonial and intersectional theories.

Moritz A. Maier (Independent scholar)

In the Spirit of Jack: Ghostly Afterimages and Gothic Revisions across Ripper Fiction

Almost from the beginning, the mysterious and apparently inexplicable murders committed by Jack the Ripper in 1888 have resulted in a sort of ‘Jekyll & Hyde-like’ approach to negotiate them. Aside from the omnipresent, more or less rational theorising about possible perpetrators, the press coverage was remarkably also characterised by a secondary and decidedly more irrational undercurrent, the invocation of Gothic images to speak about the unspeakable. Unsurprisingly, this dual nature hardly remained limited to news narratives but carried over into the subsequent process of fictionalisation, summoning a distinct body of Ripper texts of supernatural horror, which stands alongside the more familiar crime thrillers and detective stories and of course true crime accounts.

Applying a Gothic as well as mythographic perspective to the corpus of Ripper fiction, this paper examines stories wherein (wo)mankind is haunted by a ghostly serial killer or otherwise nominally supernatural threat, a trend begun with J.F. Brewer’s Curse Upon Mitre Square (1888) at the midst of the original series of events and later immortalised by Bloch’s ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’ (1943). More than a mere trope, such stories should not be simply misunderstood as or reduced to escapist fantasies or alternatively ideological fearmongering. By their use of the monstrous and ghosts in particular, the texts open themselves to discuss symbolic action and the spectral signs that continue to haunt cultural conceptions of murder as ultimate and yet incomprehensible transgression as it evolved from traditional myths and legends to modern crime fiction.

Moritz Maier is an Anglicist with a M.A. degree from the University of Regensburg and last worked as a research associate at the Chair of English Literature at TU Dresden, where he successfully defended his doctoral thesis on ‘De/mythologizing Jack the Ripper: Fictional Appropriations as Metanarrative’ in 2022. Currently an independent scholar on the lookout for a new serious research project, he works toward publishing his dissertation while enjoying himself by tentatively exploring further areas and aspects of this quasi-mythic topic which did not make the final cut. Apparently, Moritz is not quite done with the Ripper yet.   

Neerja Vyas and Rohit Dey (Manipal University Jaipur, India)

Cinematic Representation of Serial Killers in Bollywood: Tracing the Evolution and the Major Trends

True crime has grown to be a significant component of popular culture It has attracted attention by successfully shifting both its format and its subject, as evidenced by the popularity of real crime documentaries, films and TV shows at a global level. A relatively recent storytelling genre, true crime focuses on real crimes such confession videos, killer interviews, puzzles surrounding missing persons, and kidnappings. They might also be about the crimes perpetrated by thieves, cult leaders, serial killers, etc. Films of serial killers are all the more popular because of how they haunt the collective imagination through images of gruesome killings and spine-chilling vulnerability of a victim. Since these stories are not only about the killer but the about the society in entirety, it also becomes important to understand the evolving function of the storytelling which is put across through the interaction of several cinematic elements employed for such narratives. This research paper attempts to trace how the cinematic representation of serial killers has changed over time in the Hindi film industry (Bollywood). The study focuses on exploring the shifts in the portrayal of these criminals along with the change in audience response. The paper also seeks to understand how the dynamics of portrayal has changed after the arrival of OTT platforms in India.

Neerja Vyas is working as an Assistant Professor at Manipal University Jaipur. She pursued her doctoral research from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and her thesis explores the area of biopics in Hindi cinema. Her research interest lies in cultural studies explored via cinema and literature. She has published her work in national and international journals and has also presented her work at platforms like London Film and Media (2016) and CineMuseSpace, University of Cambridge (2019).

Rohit Dey is a Research Scholar at Manipal University, Jaipur. He has pursued his Post-graduation in English Literature from Savitribai Phule Pune University. His current research focuses on Film Studies in India with a specific interest in the genres of popular culture. He has a keen interest in writing fiction and non-fiction and has published some of his works.

Nicole Kenley (Baylor University, USA)

‘A Simple Brush of Skin’: Community, Outbreak, and Criminality in Hye-Young Pyun’s City of Ash and Red

In her 2008 cultural history Contagious, Priscilla Wald writes that ‘literary depictions of plague-ridden societies evince the complex vocabulary through which members of a ravaged population both respond to epidemics and experience the social connections that make them a community’ (12). This observation highlights the ways in which outbreak narratives draw on conceptions of containment and restoring the social order, two foundational concepts of crime fiction. Wald’s formulation suggests a kinship between the outbreak narrative and the crime narrative that is tested and troubled by Hye-Young Pyun’s 2010 novel City of Ash and Red. Pyun’s text suggests that, counter to ideas of outbreak and crime narrative offering a disruption to societal structures only to contain the threat and restore communal order, pandemic-level outbreaks spread not only disease but also crime on a scale vast enough to scuttle containment efforts and precipitate societal collapse.

Pyun’s novel focuses on an unnamed man who emigrates to Country C in the early days of a global pandemic. The pandemic’s rise mirrors Country C’s descent into anarchy as ever-more-desperate containment efforts, including nationwide fumigation, fail. The man contributes to the devolution of Country C’s societal fabric, starting to kill others before they can potentially infect him. In a climactic scene, the man incites a mob to burn someone alive to stop the spread of the disease. Pyun’s novel suggests that pandemics pose a threat so severe that neither outbreak narratives nor crime narratives can contain them, endangering the ongoing existence of these genres as well as the societies they infect.

Dr Nicole Kenley is the Director of First-Year Writing in the English Department at Baylor University. Her work focuses on the relationship between contemporary detective fiction and globalization and has appeared in edited collections such as The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction and The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction as well as crime fiction journals including Clues and Mean Streets. She also co-edited The Journal of Popular Culture’s 2021 special issue on place, space, and the detective narrative.

Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida, USA)

When Horror Gothic Meets the Scientific Detective Story: Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘The House and the Brain’

Though the ghost story and horror gothic both have long standing links to tales of crime, the mid-nineteenth century sees what is arguably a turning point toward combining scientific horror gothic, which begins some decades earlier, and the modern crime story, in which a detective uses rationality to discover the criminal’s narrative and impose some kind of remedy. ‘The House and the Brain,’ subsequently revised and republished as ‘The Haunters and the Haunted,’ is a relatively long short story by Edward Bulwer-Lytton first published in Blackwoods in 1859. It is often hailed as the first modern haunted house story.  It is a prolix tale of an unrentable haunted house, and three ghosts replaying an old story of love, betrayal and murder. It turns out there is one controlling intelligence, (whose rather prosaic moniker is Mr. Richards), who has cursed the house with this manifestation. The tale is notable for its combination of the older genre of the ghost story with new elements of scientific realism, along with elements of horror gothic and the paranormal. It has a scientific ghostbuster, and the usual affective elements of ghost stories–plenty of fear and terror–but also a new one: disgust, crossing from horror gothic and realism into the ghost story.  It is also, as is often the case with gothic, a crime narrative, but one very much of a type just then emerging, in which the detective uses scientific methods to solve the case.  

This story is widely thought to be innovative and influential. In 1927, H. P. Lovecraft called it ‘one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written’ (p. 41). Jess Nevins claims that it ‘effectively created the Haunted House genre. [It] … is one of the most famous and most often anthologized Victorian haunted house stories. It is also the first modern haunted house story’ (2011, para. 13), set in the present-day urban scene. More importantly for my purposes here, it does two things. Firstly, it offers a scientific observer who frames his own embodied experience of the ghost with a physiological grounding for its spooky phenomena.  It is paranormal science, but also positivist and grounded in the scientific method.  H.P. Lovecraft notes that in the early 1850s, there was a ‘wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, … so that the number of weird tales with a ‘psychic’ or pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable’ (1927, p. 41). Lytton was the author of many of these.  This also allows for a crossover from the kind of ‘sanitary’ response seen in Victorian realism to diseased sites; indeed, the response is to tear out the room from which the haunting emanates, eliminate a crystal ‘battery’ that sustains the haunting, and cleanse the room with fire.  By making the ghost material and scientifically explicable, Lytton makes the encounter with the ghost like other sanitary, physical investigations of a tainted site, to be conducted along positivist lines. The narrator does not wander into the house by mistake; he hears of the haunting and goes out of his way to experience it, (taking a dog and servant that he judges insusceptible of spooking as witnesses).  ‘The House and the Brain’ may also be the first popular ghost story that doesn’t start out with a ghost.  In the original version, the hauntings are the projection of a brain of a man who has, by various magical means, prolonged his life for generations; at the end, he turns up in a club, chatting with (and then mesmerizing and escaping) the narrator. This criminal mastermind, who has lived in Damascus ‘quite as an Oriental’ for, apparently, centuries, embodies a certain orientalist vision of paranormal secrets. However, in the revised 1864 version of the story, Lytton cut this material. In this version, the projecting ‘brain’ seems to be that of a dead man.  The story as Lytton finalized it is a ghost story; the original is, ultimately, a kind of science fiction. But its ghostbuster is in any case both a scientific and a paranormal detective.  Examining this story allows us to see a number of genre recombinations at the mid-century in a canonically important (yet neglected) work.  It also allows us to think through some of the implications of rationalism and horror gothic that often combine in this period moving toward the gothic crime story.

Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her books include Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History (Cornell, 2019); Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, (Cambridge, 1997); Mapping the Victorian Social Body (SUNY, 2004), The Citizen’s Body (Ohio State, 2007); and Cholera and Nation (SUNY, 2008). 

Paola Della Valle (University of Torino, Italy)

Isolation, Madness and Trauma: The New Zealand Gothic

The concept of ‘Gothic’ in Aotearoa New Zealand is most commonly associated with artists and creative writers exploring extreme psychological states, isolation and violence. The New Zealand inflection of the Gothic seems to be an inheritance of colonial times. The geographical position of the country – consisting in two faraway and isolated islands in the South Pacific – and the condition of its European settlers and later colonists – confronted with the ethnic and the natural ‘other,’ that is, the Māori indigenous population and the wild bush – inspired a considerable amount of Gothic colonial short stories and novels. The editor of a 2006 volume on this topic, Gothic New Zealand: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture, describes the Gothic as ‘endemic to New Zealand’s self-representation.’ The book includes images, in creative writing and visual arts, of the Kiwi Gothic, identified in abandoned houses, corrugated iron structures, tattoos, ghost paintings and events taking place in the bush or on the beach. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Gothic seems to be increasingly psychological. As Jenny Lawn observes: ‘Our monsters tend to be interior: they are experiences of intense psychological states, often with sexual undertones within isolated nuclear families.’ My contribution will explore a New Zealand Gothic contemporary work: Kirsty Gunn’s novella ‘Rain’ (1994), focusing on a dysfunctional family holidaying in an isolated lakeside community. The book highlights the passage from the Gothic idea of ‘supernatural’ to the ‘spectre’ of sexual predation and parental neglect, leading to the death of an innocent: namely from supernatural to psychological horror and trauma.

Paola Della Valle is Associate Professor at the University of Torino (Italy). She specializes in New Zealand and Pacific literature, postcolonial and gender studies. Her articles appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Textus, NZSA Bulletin of New Zealand Studies, Le Simplegadi, Il Castello di Elsinore, RiCognizioni, English Studies, Semicerchio and Loxias. She has published the monographs From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Māori Literature (Auckland, 2010), Stevenson nel Pacifico: una lettura postcoloniale (Roma, 2013) and Priestley e il tempo, il tempo di Priestley (Torino, 2016). She is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies and a member of the council of the New Zealand Studies Association.

Parnal Chirmuley (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)

Tweaking the Gothic Mode: Adaptations and Retellings in True Crime

The dark and dangerous stranger is an enduring figure in crime fiction and true crime, and bears the imprint of Gothic narratives in its fascination with the male serial killer. These narratives frame evil and the ethics around crime in particular ways. The directions that the Gothic mode has taken today, especially with new modalities such as shorts, web series, and podcasts, have opened up the space for a different kind of adaptation and (re)telling of true crime. This paper is interested in exploring ways in which gender aware narrativisations have adapted the Gothic mode, where the woman, whether as perpetrator or as site of crime occupies the space of the protagonist. Through examples of true crime stories –  such as modern retellings of the Jack the Ripper story, women poisoners, older women in a role of care as serial killers  –  as they have been adapted to and retold in cinema, on streaming platforms, and in podcasts, I hope to see how more contemporary perspectives around gender and crime have complicated the Gothic mode. I will look closely at the reframing of the idea of evil, especially in the case of women perpetrators, as well as how the Gothic mode yields space to a more public conversation around gender and violent crime. Further, I also hope to discuss the legacy of the Gothic romance (for instance in the hands of the Brontës) as it destabilises female victimhood and paints more granular characters even when it comes to a ‘dark’ masculinity.

Parnal Chirmuley is Associate Professor at the Centre of German Studies, School of Language Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Patricia Green (UNSAM, Argentina)

Gothic Configurations and Excess in the Female Mexican Crime Narrative: Reading Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

The following article explores the potential of the gothic genre to re-actualize the function and the latency of primitive dread, of the aberrant, the transgressive and the liminal in the deconstruction of the gender violence and crime within the Mexican heterotopian crime zone. The study examines how in Fernanda Melchor’s novel Hurricane Season (2017), the author’s intervention of the conventions of the crime genre partakes of a gothic configuration in which haunted ontologies and spaces stand as a-historical sites representing the nation’s crimes. In this sense, the study presents an interdisciplinary approach that draws from genre theory and narratology so as to examine how the author’s multiple narrative points of view reconfigure domains or universes of crime as tropological repositories of trauma and abuse, riddled by body horror, uncanny spectacle, and grotesque excess and performance. Alternately, the study integrates concepts from contemporary feminist theory and social studies that serve to illustrate how the author’s female gothic reassembling of the crime narrative deploys a feminist agenda through a feminist rewriting of crime aimed at unveiling the complicity of hegemonic cultural and social discourses and practices at the service of the nation’s historical patriarchal politics of oppression and subjugation in the perpetration of gender violence and crime.

Patricia Green holds a BA (Hons.) in English from the University of London and a Master in English studies from the university of Nottingham. For the past twenty years she has been teaching Literature at the teacher training courses and in 2012 she joined the University of San Martin, where she delivers the seminars on Postmodernism and Literature and on American Female detective fiction for the BA in English. Her research interests focus around three major areas: gender and genre studies, narratology and crime fiction. At present she combines research in Autobiographical fiction with teaching activities across a range of literature modules on diverse topics, such as academic writing, feminist narratives and postmodernist fiction. She is a candidate for the PhD in Human Sciences for the School of Humanities at the UNSAM and is currently working on her doctoral thesis on Genre studies and Contemporary feminist crime fiction.

Peter J Church (University of Exeter, UK)

‘If he was a highwayman, it was altogether the fault of the highways’: Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839) Revisited through the Lens of the Newgate Crime Tradition

I will discuss how the early Victorian perception of a morally stagnant Indian society served to illuminate the problems destabilising British domestic society; and similarly, how an abhorrence of the British criminal outcast informed the characterisation of evil in the murderous Indian thug. I will explore how two semi-fictional Gothic characters, who may appear on first examination to be entirely distinct in heritage, culture, and values, were deployed respectively by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the Newgate novel, Paul Clifford (1830), and Philip Meadows Taylor in Confessions of a Thug (1839), to portray the parallel spectre of traumatically fractured societies anchored on archaic judicial systems and barbaric penal codes. Both authors believed that it was the ‘Philosophy of Circumstance,’ encountered by Paul Clifford, a retrospective of eighteenth-century Britain’s villainous highwaymen, and by Ameer Ali, a nineteenth-century criminal composite of the hereditary thug-caste in Taylor’s ‘Oriental’ horror story, through which social injustice, manifested in poverty, unemployment, starvation, and homelessness, created a subversive criminal underworld wandering on the fringes of civilised society. Bulwer-Lytton perceived that the solution was to address the root cause of social disorder, rather than persecuting the hapless criminal, who was invariably the victim of unfortunate circumstances. In this context, I will consider how the discourses of British and Indian crime converge, so that India was perceived as a human laboratory for sociological experimentation, with the utilitarian and evangelical reform of India, particularly in relation to the legal system and the penal code, serving as a blueprint for the self-civilising mission of broken domestic society.

Peter J Church graduated from Oriel College, Oxford University, with an honours degree in Philosophy and Theology. He has an interesting backstory, with a career in commercial leisure during which he designed national award-winning entertainment venues and also served as Chief Executive of a professional football club. In 2019, he returned to academic studies whilst working full-time as the Bursar of Wellington College International School in Bangkok. He completed a P/T MLitt (Distinction) in Viking Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, and was awarded the Institute of Northern Studies’ prize for the Best Dissertation for his research on Viking raids on Irish church settlements. He also won the prestigious international competition for the Magnus Magnusson Essay Prize 2020 for his work on Irish place-names. In September 2020, he enrolled with the University of Exeter to research for a P/T doctoral thesis on the characterisation of evil in the early Victorian Gothic, which he will complete this autumn in just two years. He is in discussions with Taylor & Francis to publish his doctoral thesis.

Piotr Sobolczyk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

Failed Crime Story or Gothic Art of Failure? Witold Gombrowicz between The Possessed and Cosmos

In this paper I want to examine the uncanny interplay between Witold Gombrowicz’s last novel Cosmos and his early ‘unofficial’ novel The Possessed. Cosmos early in the reception was dubbed a crime story made ‘serious’ and ‘highbrow.’ The Possessed, on the other hand, written under a pseudonym, were considered ‘low brow’ and a literary joke of a serious writer. This Gothic novel was seen as a mere parody of Gothic convention. When compared, these two novels which share many similar motifs, reveal that Cosmos plunges in irrationality while The Possessed sport a very rationalist viewpoint eventually. One of the most evident differences between the Gothic and crime stories, traditionally, was that crime story’s viewpoint is a celebration of rationality. As for the Gothic, things are more complicated, there is a line of novels where irrationality is ‘forgiven’ with the rational ending. In my reading I wish to ‘gothicise’ the reading of Cosmos as a crime story:  crime fiction and Gothic conventions intersect here. With the queer component, such categories as ‘queer gothic,’ ‘queer art of failure’ might be introduced as well. A psychoanalytic reading of the ‘irrational / rational’ (or Gothic / crime) in Cosmos is especially helpful.

Piotr Sobolczyk is a professor of queer theory and comparative literature at the Institute of Literary Research, Warsaw. He earned his doctorate in literary theory in 2008 at Jagiellonian University and his habilitation in queer theory at University of Silesia (2019). He published two books in English: Polish Queer Modernism (2015), and The Worldview – the Trope – and the Critic. Critical Discourses on Miron Białoszewski (2018), as well as articles in English in SQS. A Journal of Queer Studies, Foucault Studies, Lambda Nordica, Pl.It, Slavic Review, The Polish Review, and more. He also published 5 academic books in Polish, including Gotycyzm – modernistyczny sobowtór odmieńca (2017) [Gothicism – a Modernist Double of the Queer], the first monograph of Polish XXth century (queer) Gothic literature. He is the editor of MiroFor and Polish Gothic journals. He was a guest lecturer at Universitat i Oslo, INALCO Paris, Universidad Pablo Olavide in Sevilla, Edge Hill University (UK), Univesité Clermont Auvergne, Sorbonne Université, Universita degli Studi di Milano La Statale. He organised international conferences in Paris and Warsaw.  

Rebecca Lloyd (Independent scholar)

Criminal Stories: Gothicising the Fairy Tale and Animal Abuse in Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad (1992)

Terry Pratchett is best known for his humorous fantasy Discworld series, set in an alternative universe but one bearing a striking similarity to our ‘Roundworld,’ enabling him to bring his comedic force to bear on everything from science to literature, philosophy, religion, history, politics and social and cultural institutions familiar to us. It is particularly noticeable, therefore, when Pratchett’s anger is evident instead of the usual playful treatment of a topic, and this paper explores how he rages against the abuse of the animal in the service of the fairy tale narrative that prioritises supposed human happiness.

Hart (2020) has argued that folklore and fairy tales can be critiqued through ‘a Gothic sensibility of horror’ to explore their darkness, violence and monstrosity. Pratchett, as will be demonstrated, considers in Witches Abroad how the impact of the seemingly irresistible drive of such narratives reveals their brutal anthropocentrism in the Gothic figure of the animal forced to behave as if human. For Pratchett, a wolf twisted by magic against its species merely to fulfil its role in the story of Red Riding Hood, is a being tortured into desiring its own death, victim not predator. The novel raises questions about how and why such tales ultimately serve neither human nor non-human well, and underpins Pratchett’s core beliefs of respect, tolerance and the freedom to be oneself, irrespective of one’s species origin.

Rebecca Lloyd is an independent researcher, focused on Gothic creatures/landscapes, humour, ghost and crime fictions. Publications include ‘Ghostly Objects and the Horrors of Ghastly Ancestors in the Ghost Stories of Louisa Baldwin’ in Women’s Writing, Vol. 29 (2), July 2022, co-authored with Ruth Heholt; ‘Dead Pets’ Society: Gothic Animal Bodies in the Films of Tim Burton’ in Hockenhull, S. and Pheasant-Kelly, F. (eds.) Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely (2021); ‘The Human Within and the Animal Without? Rats and Mr Bunnsy in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents’ in Heholt, R. & Edmundson, M. (eds.) Gothic Animals (2020); ‘Gravy Soup: humouring conformity and counterfeiting in A Rogue’s Life in The Wilkie Collins Journal, 2017, Vol.14; ‘Haunting the Grown-ups: The Borderlands of ParaNorman and Coraline’ in Heholt, R. & Downing, N. (eds.) Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment (2016); and co-author with Ruth Heholt on Anne Rice for The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2013).

Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania)

The Monstrous Feminine: Chudails as Malefactors in Contemporary Hindi Films

This paper examines representations of chudails in contemporary Hindi films, and it argues that filmic construction of the character of chudail as an offender unleashing violence has largely been an act of reproducing the hegemonic patriarchal notion that a woman, especially a ‘transgressive’ woman, is the threatening Other. Although the term chudail is associated with a vengeful female ghost that returns as a revenant to avenge past injustice and trauma, its usages in everyday discourse are much wider and more sinister. The paper reflects on the social and cultural ramifications of the image of chudail who in India’s popular imagination appears in diverse forms- ranging from a woman with ‘hideous’ designs to a half-human witch. Given the prevalence of the practice of witch-hunting, which is rare but not uncommon in twenty-first century India, the formulation of the character of chudail in Hindi films demands critical scrutiny. Employing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection along with feminist arguments of Mary Daly, the paper underscores how representations of chudails as the monstrous feminine in mainstream Hindi films produced in Mumbai film industry regurgitate the fear and anxiety of patriarchal structures. Drawing examples from various Hindi horror films (viz. Ek Thi Daayan, 2013; Chudail Story, 2016), it contends that the resolution of filmic narratives with the expulsion of chudails is an instance of cinematic endorsement of violence perpetrated by patriarchal authorities against women. Finally, the paper concludes by positing its arguments within the context of gender-based crimes that have alarmingly escalated in contemporary India.

Dr Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis is an educator, researcher, creative writer and translator. At present, she teaches at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities in Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania. Her research interests include gender studies, caste, subaltern literature, and media representations. Her academic articles have been published in various peer-reviewed international journals and in edited collections. Her translated works have been published by the Orient Blackswan and Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, India. Her co-edited book Gender, Cinema, Streaming Platforms: Shifting Frames in Neoliberal India is soon to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. She was awarded a fellowship for a collaborative research project, ‘Manly Matters: Representations of Maleness in South Asian Popular Visual Practice,’ funded by the Anneliese Maier Research Award and granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. Runa was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion in Jawaharlal University, India.

Ruth Heholt (Falmouth University, UK)

A Bird of Ill Omen: The ‘Mysteries’ Tradition, Real Life Crime, and the Gothic in the Pitch-Black Tales of Catherine Crowe

This paper looks at the Gothic collection of tales, Light and Darkness: Or the Mysteries of Life published by Catherine Crowe in 1850. Crowe is best known for her 1848 collection of ‘real’ ghost stories The Night Side of Nature, but this paper delves into the very darkest side of Crowe’s work, concentrating on the drippingly dark stories ‘The Lycanthropist’ and ‘The Monk’s Tale.’ The first story is of Sergeant François Bertrand, who rampages through cemeteries at night under ‘a horrible impulse’ which causes him to disinter, tear, mutilate, and probably eat the corpses in the graves. ‘The Monk’s Tale’ is one of murder, somnambulism, and premature burial. In Light and Darkness, these terrifying explorations of vampirism, cannibalism, and monomania present some of the best examples of the Gothic short story in the period. This paper argues that working within the mid-century craze for the ‘Mysteries,’ as exemplified by the work of the male writers G. W. M. Reynolds and Eugene Sue, Crowe shifts the genre, merging crime fiction with the short story form associated with the ghost story. Forming a bridge between the Newgate Novels of the 1840s and the yet-to-come Sensation Novels of the 1860s, the ‘Mysteries’ were usually novels, but Crowe presents short stories that intersect crime and the Gothic in what often becomes a very entertaining melodramatic blood-fest. Bearing in mind that these tales are presented as ‘real,’ we might be able to agree with the reviewer in the Rambler who said, ‘Mrs. Crowe, is still a bird of ill-omen, black and croaking, haunting ‘the night-side of nature.’’

Ruth Heholt is Associate Professor of Dark Economies and Gothic Literature at Falmouth University in the UK. She is author of Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics, (Routledge 2020), and founding editor of the online journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.

S Sindhu (Stella Maris College, India)

Of Goddess, Demons and Sleuths: Swirling Through the Mysteries of Suzhal: The Vortex

Suzhal: The Vortex (2022) is a Tamil crime thriller streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The eight-part web series is created by Pushkar-Gayathri, acclaimed filmmaker duo from the Indian film industry. The show explores the case of a missing girl in a secluded and sleepy fictional town, Saambaloor. The series is set in the backdrop of a 10-day festival, Mayana Kollai, that translates to pillaging the graveyard, a dravidian folk practice found in various districts of Tamil Nadu and symboiles an annual raid on the dead. The festivities involve paying tribute to the Goddess, in this case the local deity Angalamman, who is taken on a procession through the town and eventually drowned  in a river by the burial ground. The celebrations involve townspeople also decking up like the Goddess, carrying tridents, sporting artificial tongues and indulging in animal sacrifices. The mood is very volatile and devotees sometimes go into a state of trance or frenzy making it very difficult for law and order to prevail.

This paper proposes to examine the use of the Mayana Kollai festival as a metaphor to bring justice to the victims of a horrendous crime. Additionally, the paper attempts to study the show’s appropriation of various sub-genres of crime such as the hard-boiled PI genre, nordic noir and police procedural while analysing the three strands of investigative methods; a police procedural, a trauma-stricken sister’s quest to save her sibling, and an insurance agent who doubles as a PI and attempts to unravel the many mysteries of the quaint town.

S Sindhu is an Assistant Professor at the English Department in Stella Maris College (Autonomous), Chennai with 10 years of teaching experience. Her areas of interest include Crime Narratives, Indian Literatures, Subaltern Studies and Film Studies. She has also taught Journalistic Writing, and British Literature through her teaching career. She intends to apply for her PhD that would focus on Tamil Cinema in the upcoming academic year.

Samantha Landau (University of Tokyo, Japan)

Burn the Home, Banish the Ghosts: Crime and the Gothic in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) was Shirley Jackson’s final completed novel and uses both the motif of the Domestic Gothic within a crime narrative. Before the start of the novel, the narrator Merricat has poisoned most of her family by putting arsenic into the sugar bowl at dinner. Although she spared only her older sister, Constance, Constance covered up the murders and is put on trial instead of Merricat. While scholarship has previously focused similarities between the novel’s murders and real crimes such as the Lizzie Borden case and the Charles Bravo Murder, the novel’s murders also broadly recall crimes from cinema and fiction, especially those that involved poisoning. While arsenic was named as the cause for about a third of all criminal cases of poisoning during the nineteenth century and the number of cases diminished into the twentieth century, poisoning remained in the popular imagination in crime fiction. Jackson also seems to have drawn inspiration from folksongs, which often feature bawdy retellings of famous crimes – this appears in the story in the form of songs the villager children sing at Merricat. Drawing on archival materials from the Jackson archive at the Library of Congress, Jackson’s correspondence, and true crime narratives, this paper recontextualize the novel’s confluences with crime fiction. It will also elucidate how Merricat’s crimes of murder and arson were akin to other Gothic heroines before her: a premeditated attempt to rewrite the domestic-social order.

Samantha Landau is a Project Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo (Komaba) in Japan. Her research primarily concerns Gothic fiction. She also researches at the intersection of cultural studies, music, and poetry. Recently, she co-founded the Gothic in Asia Association (GAA) and co-organized its launch events. She is currently working on a monograph on the Domestic Gothic. She is also currently working on research for a 4-year JSPS Grant-in-Aid (KAKENHI). In addition to her life as an academic, Samantha has been singing and performing classical music for over 25 years.

Sang-hyon Nam, Chungnam National University, South Korea

Anxiety and Fear Created by the Loophole of Legal System in Modern Japanese Society – Japanese TV Series Mr. Frog the Serial Killer (2020)

The Mr. Frog the Serial Killer, based on a book Renzoku Satsujinki Kaeru Otoko (Mr. Frog the Serial Killer) (2011) written by Shichiri Nakayama, became a TV drama series in 2020, after the decadal period. The three kinds of huge fear can be found through this TV series. First, a fear from the visualization of a grotesque serial murder case. A grotesque visual is not the only part that TV series brings the fear. The evil suspect who kills the victims like a frog without any hesitate, was a mentally defective person/former juvenile delinquents who cannot be punished properly even they commit a severe crime. From this situation, second, the anxiety of the loophole that law cannot penalize this insanity became a wave of horror. Finally, the fear against the mentally defective person, escalated the madness of the crowd to behave violent and maximized as a terror. It can also be said that the anxiety and fear created by distrust towards the legal system in modern Japanese society reproduced the bizarreness and madness. Is the true horror a bloody-grotesque crime, or a twisted Japanese system that deliberately created by the crime? In this presentation, I would like to clarify the abyss of fear experienced by modern Japanese society and reinterpret the fear that expressed in the TV series Mr. Frog the Serial Killer.

Sang-hyon Nam is a Research Professor at Chungnam National University in South Korea. In 2020, Nam successfully defended her doctor’s thesis ‘A Study on Juvenile Crime Novels in Postwar Japan.’ She specializes in Japanese modern and contemporary literature and culture, also the society dealing with juvenile problems.

Sarah Olive (Kobe College, Japan / Bangor University, UK)

Textual Instability around Gendered and Sexual Violence in Stephenie Meyer’s YA Vampire Fiction

This paper explores representations of gendered and sexual violence in Stephenie Meyer’s YA vampire fiction, behaviours and actions that would in many countries be criminalised. Meyer’s series is already well-attended to by Gothic scholars. In a new twister, however, this paper concentrates on textual comparison of Twilight (2005) with the partial, leaked PDF and authorised book of Midnight Sun (2008 and 2020). It couples methods for analysing multiple versions of a text, common to textual studies, with feminist media effects theory to consider the significance of textual variants in Meyer’s representations of these behaviours and actions in her fictional characters’ teenage, romantic relationships. The paper articulates ways that these variations accentuate, or alternatively subdue, the oft-perceived criminal character of Edward’s plans and actions. The international notoriety of the story at the heart of all three texts has afforded the Meyer the opportunity – wittingly or otherwise – to respond to commentary, critiques and adulation from readers, fans, critics, the film adaptations, as well as to react to evolving feminist zeitgeists over a period of fifteen years (between the Twilight and the Midnight Sun books). The paper concludes that the availability of these multiple versions offers readers and fans an unusual opportunity to understand vampire Edward as a literary character and construct, which might nuance reactions to the real-world criminality (or not) of his fictional conduct and their possible impacts on readers.

Dr Sarah Olive is a Senior Lecturer at Bangor University (UK). She is one of the founding members of the Gothic in Asia Association. She gained funding to co-found GAA from the GB Sasakawa Foundation in 2020. Sarah’s gothic interest centres on vampires in young adult (YA) literature, especially those texts appropriating Shakespeare. She shared her work on this as a plenary speaker at the Gothic Spaces conference in 2019. In 2018, she co-ran the Gothic in Japan conference with Dr Alex Watson (Meiji), resulting in the collaborative creation of an online resource on British Gothic monsters in East Asian culture that reflects and enriches her own teaching.

Sarah Sproston (University of Wolverhampton, UK)

‘Except for the body, I was the only woman’: Urban Fantasy and the Female Detective

Urban fantasy is a hybrid genre, borrowing from many different genre traditions. Stefan Ekman describes that urban fantasy’s ‘root genres are not only fantasy but Gothic horror and romance’ and that it also draws ‘on mystery, science fiction, and crime fiction.’ Many urban fantasy series follow a female protagonist working as a private investigator or detective, often alongside the police. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series (1993-present) was one of the first urban fantasy series to introduce this type of heroine. Hamilton says she wanted ‘to counteract detective fiction where male characters got to cuss and have casual sex.’ As Laura Miller discusses, however, having a female detective who has casual sex has caused ‘a perennial argument in urban fantasy’ related to ‘the ratio of crime to sex, or more broadly, of mystery to relationships.’ Blake is frequently the only woman at crime scenes, she is underestimated because she is a woman, and she must constantly prove herself to be just as good as the men with whom she works. Hamilton draws on crime fiction, especially in her early novels, to highlight sexism and misogyny in male dominated environments and she is drawing on a traditionally male genre to do so. This paper will explore how the gender issues surrounding the urban fantasy genre’s intersection with crime fiction play out both on and off the page in the Anita Blake series.

Sarah Sproston is a sixth year, part-time PhD student at the University of Wolverhampton. She has a BA in English from the University of Wolverhampton (2011) and an MA in English Studies: The Gothic from Manchester Metropolitan University (2016). Her current area of research is the urban fantasy genre, focussing on representations of female adolescence in young adult urban fantasy. Her other areas of interest include the Gothic, paranormal romance, fantasy, young adult literature, crossover and series fiction.

Šárka Dvořáková (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic)

The Sins of Our Fathers: The Gothic Possibilities of Scottish Islands

Islands are places of contradiction: they can be both prisons and refuges for those who seek individual freedom. They can be places of enforced conformity as well as of personal growth. Scotland too is a land of contrasts and contradictions due to its marginalized status following the Act of Union and the suppression of its culture and history. The stateless nation perceives itself as fractured by dichotomies such as Highland v. Lowland, English- v. Gaelic-speaking, as encapsulated by G. Gregory Smith’s term Caledonian Antisyzygy. The Scottish islands especially have been othered and conceptualized as rich in terms of history but desperately primitive in all other aspects.

Scottish island-set crime fiction uses similar tropes as the 21st century Gothic. The distant mysterious past is visually present in Neolithic monuments, and both personal and national histories exist simultaneously with the present, haunting those involved and their children. Innocent outsiders disturb the status quo and unearth (sometimes literally) carefully hidden truths, initiating the rewriting of history. Monstrosity is often present as a matter of course and the island, with its claustrophobic community, its dark, rainy weather, hard work, and diminishing population is seen as a breeding ground for emotional disorder. Using the theoretical framework of Literary Island Studies and Rebecca Wait’s 2020 novel Our Fathers as an example, this paper investigates the presence of the Scottish brand of the Gothic in island crime fiction with special attention being paid to the manifestations of the Caledonian Antisyzygy.

Šárka Dvořáková is a 4th year PhD student of Anglo-American literatures at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her research focuses on the depiction of small islands in literature, especially Scottish islands as setting in 21st century thriller and crime fiction. She employs the methods and tools of Literary Islands Studies within the larger multidisciplinary field of Island Studies.

Šarūnas Paunksnis (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania)

Haunted Neoliberalism and Posthuman Horror in India: A Case of 13B: Fear Has a New Address

The paper, by examining a Hindi film 13B: Fear Has a New Address (dir. Vikram Kumar, 2009), analyzes a peculiar trend that can be found in different horror films in India over the past several decades – a haunted apartment building. Why has this trend emerged? The paper argues that while a new apartment in a high-rise building located in a gated community represents the aspirations of upwardly mobile middle classes and the ‘new rich’ of neoliberal India that emerged in the 1990s, the haunting and uncanniness aims to dislocate what Sloterdijk terms as a capitalist maya – an illusion that neoliberal capitalism provides safety and security both in terms of class location and physical space of dwelling. The ghost in such films is the uncanny past, usually represented by a murdered former resident, repressed in the collective consciousness, returning to haunt the ‘affluent’ present. However, what is most striking about 13B: Fear Has a New Address, is the posthuman nature of haunting as the ghost enters into the lives of the dwellers of the present through television, that is – by using digital media technologies to haunt. The paper will analyze the film on two different planes – as an example of haunting as a pre-neoliberal residue, and as an example of a posthuman nature of haunting. What such type of haunting reflects is both the uncanny nature of forgotten past and a crime that has been committed, and the uncanny nature of media technology that saturates our everyday life.

Dr Šarūnas Paunksnis is an Associate Professor in Digital Culture, Communication and Media Research Group, Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology in Kaunas, Lithuania. His current research interests include new media, Indian cinema, digital humanities, science and technology studies, cultural theory, postcolonial theory. A Fulbright and Chevening alumnus, he did research at Columbia University, New York, SOAS, University of London as well at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India on numerous occasions. In 2016 Brill published his edited book Dislocating Globality: Deterritorialization, Difference and Resistance, and in 2019 Oxford University Press has published his book Dark Fear, Eerie Cities: New Hindi Cinema in Neoliberal India.

Selki Noh (Korea University, South Korea)

A Gothic Variant of Poe: Kenzaburō Ōe’s The Beautiful Annabel Lee Was Chilled and Killed

In the poem Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator ‘I’ portrays his love for Annabel Lee. What if Annabel Lee were a gothic novel? Kenzaburō Ōe’s The Beautiful Annabel Lee Was Chilled and Killed, inspired by the poem Annabel Lee, shows how a romantic poem can be transformed into a gothic novel. Sakura, a movie star struggling with a vague fear, faces the truth that she was molested in her sleep by her guardian, the filmmaker, in the film she was in her 10s. The novel may seem to depict women’s victory and self-restoring. From her own angle, however, was she ultimately recovered from all the things that made her suffer? Her hardships and the whole process of her recovery are depicted from the perspective of only ‘I,’ the narrator, male. ‘I’ is also not free from her scars in that he is also the one who sexually fantasizes about her. This study explores how ‘I’ in Annabel Lee, who had grieved Annabel’s death, can be read as a character of desiring her and locking her into his ‘kingdom of fantasy’ through Ōe’s work. Poe’s Annabel Lee is now given the room to be interpreted in a gothic way by Ōe.

Selki Noh is a Master’s student majoring in modern Japanese literature at Korea university in South Korea. Her research interests cover 60s modern literature in Japan, mainly focusing on Jun Eto’s literary criticism stemming from his Pro-US patriotism and Kenzaburō Ōe’s works as the opposite of Eto. She had her first conference debut in August 2022 at Korea Association of Japanology, the biggest Japan-related association in South Korea, with the title of NHK TV series Ryomaden: The Meiji that continues to the present. It suggests how the spirit of the Meiji, a product of the Meiji era that had constructed the modern nation, has continued to the present as a national ideology through the media and is linked to the topic of her Master’s thesis that will come out in August. Currently, she is participating in the research workshop from December 2022, as she was selected as the next-generation researcher by the Japan Foundation on behalf of Korea University.

Shengyu Wang (Soochow University, China)

Dangerous Corpses: Crimes of the Undead in Qing Dynasty Chinese Zombie Tales

During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China witnessed a proliferation of horror stories about human characters’ close encounters with zombie-like reanimated corpses, commonly known as jiangshi. The eminent eighteenth-century scholar Ji Yun (1724-1805) classified jiangshi into two broad categories, and his typology remains influential in the studies of corporeal revenants today. Ji Yun mainly used criteria related to recentness of death, statuses of burial, and capabilities of transformation. This paper, however, suggests that criminality remains a hitherto overlooked fundamental difference between the two types of jiangshi. Using examples drawn from Qing dynasty collections of supernatural tales, this paper examines a wide variety of crimes committed by reanimated corpses. As I will show, of the two types of jiangshi, only corpses that have been buried or placed outside the homesphere are relatable to vagabonds, thieves, and various kinds of dangerous Others in the Chinese empire. In horror tales, these jiangshi appear less as assailants of individual victims and more as predatory monsters posing an existential threat to the community or even the state. Moreover, while many of these tales may have folk origins, I show that the texts’ stance on jiangshi and the threat they pose is more reflective of the concerns of the scholar-officials who recorded these stories.

Shengyu Wang holds a PhD degree in Comparative Literature and teaches in the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Soochow University. His writing is featured or forthcoming in Comparative Literature, Renditions, Folklore, and T’oung Pao. He is the 2022 winner of Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Award for his journal article on Herbert Giles’ 1880 translation of Pu Songling’s 17th-century collection of tales of the strange.

Shweta Sachdeva Jha (University of Delhi, India)

Terror and Mystery in Postcolonial Fiction in Urdu: Ibn-e Safi and Crime Fiction

Ibn-e-Safi (1928-1980) was the pen name of Asrar Narvi Ahmad, a prolific writer of crime fiction in Urdu whose literary career as a writer of crime fiction began in the tumultuous context of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent. Safi had a large following across Hindi and Urdu readers in India and Pakistan. Famous for two crime series featuring Captain Faridi and Ali Imran who later became Agent X2, Safi was also an avid reader of crime fiction and writer of poetry and humor. This paper will focus on his crime fiction to unravel the intertwined history of gothic and crime fiction in postcolonial South Asia. Right from the titles of his initial stories such as ‘The House of Dread,’ ‘The Laughing Corpse,’ ‘The Terrifying Man’ and more, Safi was adept at using gothic elements such as mysterious deaths, sudden appearance of ghostly apparitions, eerie noises, haunted mansions in his fiction. This paper will contextualize his use of gothic and crime fiction tropes in the time of emerging nationalisms in the 1950s that would also shape the conflicted nature of Indo-Pak relations in the future. I will explore traces indigenous to Urdu and Hindi crime fiction in colonial India as well as the influence of English crime writers such as Victor Gunn in his narrative style. Safi’s mysteries were solved by logic and reason; however, the strains of the uncanny accompanied the formulaic use of tropes in a distinct voice of postcolonial crime fiction in Urdu.

Shweta Sachdeva Jha studied History as a Felix Scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She teaches English at Miranda House, University of Delhi. Her interdisciplinary and multilingual research areas include Urdu and Hindi literature, children’s picture books, women’s history. Her publications on the tawa’if include essays in journals and books such as African and Asian Studies, Narratives of India Cinema (Primus Books), and Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia (Duke University Press). Her project on children’s picture books in India was awarded the Delhi University Innovations Grant  (2015–16). More recently, she has been recipient of the Dr Avabai Wadia Archive Fellowship, Centre for Women’s studies, SNDT University in 2019–20 to build an archival collection on college women under the Miranda House Archiving Project.

Somdatta Bhattacharya (IIT Kharagpur, India)

Reason and Unreason as Tools of Detection: The ‘Astro-detective’ in Manjiri Prabhu’s Fiction

Scientific method and materialist approach to reality mark much of contemporary detective fiction. But we see a turn towards astrology, occult and magic traditions in contemporary Gothic fiction and its sub-genre, occult detective fiction. The works of Indian detective fiction writer Manjiri Prabhu can be classified under the latter. Her Sonia Samarth novels, while located in modern day Pune in India, take recourse to the supernatural for solving the mysteries. The central character Sonia Samarth, hailed as India’s first ‘astro-detective’ and founder of Stellar Detective Agency, has an interesting modus operandi. She reads the horoscopes of people involved in the cases to solve them and find the culprit. The term ‘occult science’ was first used in English in the seventeenth century and owed its early popularity to Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (‘Three Books of Occult Philosophy’), first printed in 1531. Agrippa used the word ‘occult’ as the opposite of ‘manifest,’ representing knowledge that was not readily available to the five senses. In contradiction to ideas of ‘ratiocination’ and methods of observation, which are usually the basis of every act of solving mysteries, occult is an interesting tool of detection. The paper will reflect on this crucial departure from reason as an investigative method, and attempt to read Prabhu’s works as modern female Gothic narratives, with their emphasis on critiquing women’s condition in oppressive patriarchal systems. The paper will also engage with the potential of the Gothic as literature with transnational reach, to grapple with alterity, with traumatic national pasts and the ‘viral’ dimension of the digital age that leads to new nightmares.

Somdatta Bhattacharya has a PhD in English Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. In the past, she has also taught at institutions such as the University of Hyderabad and BITS Pilani, India. Her research interests are rooted in areas of urban cultures, social theories of space and spatiality, crime fiction, city in literature, Indian writing in English, gender and South Asian popular culture, and she has taught, published, presented and supervised extensively in these areas. She has also been an investigator in multiple government and privately funded projects on the Indian urban underclass. Her most recent area of interest is plant humanities.

Suriyaporn Eamvijit (Thammasat University, Thailand)

The Hauntological Fifth Tiger: 90’s Nostalgia as Horror in Concrete Clouds (2013) and The Promise (2017)

The Tom Yam Kung crisis has left impacts not only on public and private sectors, but also on Thai movies from the 2000s to the 2010s. Several movies during the 2000s reflect trauma from the unrealized national dream by glorifying Thailand’s past and its traditional values while portraying foreigners as antagonists. On the other hand, nostalgic sentiments for the prelapsarian country are discussed differently in some 2010’s films, including Lee Chatametikul’s Concrete Clouds (2013) and Sophon Sakdaphisit’s The Promise (2017). This paper aims to examine the two works through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and nostalgia theories by Svetlana Boym. It argues that the two films’ reference to the nineties culture is not intended to provide comfort to the audience. Both portray suicides, murder, and family problems after the financial crisis along with the popular media, song, and gadgets in the nineties. However, by associating these nostalgic elements with horror and surrealism, the two works contest the hegemonic memory that regards the nineties as an idealized period and therefore render the country’s frozen nostalgia multifaceted. In the two films, the core of horror does not lie in the invasion of foreign capitalists, but in the historical amnesia and in dysfunctional families caused by conventional family values. Moreover, Concrete Clouds and The Promise attempt to offer hope from the despair of capitalist realism by suggesting how retrospective nostalgia can be transformed into a creative impulse through an alternative way of looking at the history as well as the future.

Suriyaporn Eamvijit is a lecturer of Literary Studies at the Faculty of Liberal Arts. Her research interests include literary studies, cultural studies, politics of design, and the intersection of architecture and literature. Her current research is the development and dynamics of punk fashion among Thai youths from 2000s to 2020s.

Sylvia A. Pamboukian (Robert Morris University, Canada)

Haunted-House Crime in Agatha Christie and Last Night in Soho

Last Night in Soho (2021) depicts a modern fashion student, Heloise, haunted by her Soho flat’s previous tenant, a 1960s singer. What begins as effervescent dreams about a swinging era quickly become harrowing nightmares of misogyny, exploitation, and murder. As Maurizio Ascari suggests, detective fiction emphasizes rationality but incorporates Gothic elements such as ghosts, revelatory dreams, and revenge plots to create a sense of divine justice at work. Haunted-house crime stories may satisfy this sense of slow justice; however, they may also disrupt our faith in justice, particularly regarding gendered abuse and crime.

Like Last Night in Soho, several Agatha Christie stories, including ‘At Bertram’s Hotel,’ ‘Nemesis,’ and ‘Sleeping Murder,’ depict places haunted by past crimes. In ‘Nemesis,’ Miss Marple’s estate tour evokes an idealized past until she reaches a creepy mansion where young women were abused and murdered. In ‘Sleeping Murder,’ a young woman’s dreams about her new house transform into suppressed memories of abuse and murder. Just as in Last Night in Soho, nostalgia takes a Gothic turn when confronted with past crimes. Moreover, in all of these texts modern women repeat the experiences of past victims, nearly becoming victims themselves. Taken together, these texts illuminate a dynamic in Gothic detective fiction in which past crimes disrupt nostalgia. They also emphasize continuities between past and present regarding sexual abuse and exploitation. In doing so, the haunted house crime story becomes not a Gothic fantasy but a reminder that misogyny and abuse are not safely in the past. 

Dr Sylvia Pamboukian is a professor of English and interim director of the University Honors Program. She holds a PhD in English and Victorian Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington; an MA in English from Western University; and a BSc. Pharmacy from the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching areas include Victorian literature, the health humanities, and detective fiction. She is the author of Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle, and her forthcoming book from Palgrave Macmillan is entitled Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison.

Tanima Kumari (Lalit Narayan Mithila University, India)

Examining the Infamous Rape Case of Nirbhaya through India’s Daughter (2015) and Delhi Crime (2019)

The inhuman gang rape of Nirbhaya in New Delhi (2012) brought a huge outcry across India and worldwide concerning a woman’s ‘life question.’ This infamous rape incident revealed what it takes to be a woman that jeopardizes her life too. Popular as Nirbhaya rape case, it ignited the discourse of sexual violence and crime against women leading to the amendment of rape laws in India. The present paper, thus, seeks to examine through India’s Daughter in 2015 (BBC Documentary) and Delhi Crime in 2019 (Netflix series), the rape culture prevalent in India, and it probes into the articulations and protests emerged against the perpetuators. I would delve my reading to explore the huge movement’s oeuvre against the criminals worldwide. The aim of the proposed paper is to unveil how Jyoti Singh’s rape widely known as Nirbhaya’s rape case is documented and represented in India’s Daughter and Delhi Crime. It would investigate into Jyoti Singh’s rape case that became an allegory of a raped nation. Moreover, the paper would also analyse rape culture in India across history and societal space. Therefore, in my exploration, I will sketch on the feminist scholarship as the conceptual model to read rape culture in India.

Dr Tanima Kumari completed M.A. (English) from Banaras Hindu University and PhD from IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. Presently, she is an Assistant Professor in the department of English, C.M. College, Darbhanga under Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga, India. Her articles have been published in many international journals, including journals indexed in Thomson Reuters and Scopus database. She has also presented many research papers in national and international conferences including Oxford University, U.K. Her areas of specialization are African-American Poetry, Gender Studies, Indian English Poetry, Literary Theory, Indian Theatre, Postcolonial Studies.

Tsung-Han Tsai (National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan)

‘He keeps people alive’: War, Medical Ethics, and Crime in E. M. Forster’s ‘Dr Woolacott’

This paper considers E. M. Forster’s short story ‘Dr Woolacott.’ It examines how Forster reworks late Victorian gothic conventions to conjure up the First World War as a past with secrets. Specifically, through the words of the farmhand – a spectre of a WWI soldier – who visits the main character Clesant, a ‘chronic invalid,’ Forster insinuates that the provision of medical care in war was criminally intrusive and repressive: that is, Dr Woolacott’s ‘marvellously unselfish work,’ his sense of ‘proportion,’ and his attempt to ‘keep people alive’ are a foil for repression. Examining this characterization of treatment as a crime, of the medical profession as murderous, the paper discusses how Forster’s rare experiment with the Gothic is simultaneously a rejection of scientific discourses about sexual deviances and a challenge to a matrix of ideas surrounding the soldier hero.

Published in the posthumous collection The Life to Come (1972), ‘Dr Woolacott’ has often been read biographically as one of Forster’s erotic, self-titillating stories and studied primarily for its representation of homosexuality. But the complexity of the story demands that we place it more contextually in literary and cultural history; hence this paper’s attempt to highlight the story’s gothic elements and First World War references. Reading the ghost’s revelation of Dr Woolacott’s medical ‘crime,’ the paper considers the story’s intervention into issues of medical ethics and war. This approach helps to contextualize Forster’s portrayal of the intimacy between Clesant and the farmhand within a more specific historical moment and awakens its unexpected potency as a post-WWI discourse about war, medicine, and masculinity. 

Tsung-Han Tsai is Assistant Professor at National Kaohsiung Normal University in Taiwan. His work focuses on music and twentieth-century literature, particularly the relation between music and politics. He is author of E. M. Forster and Music (Cambridge, 2021) and co-editor (with Emma Sutton) of Twenty-first-century Readings of E. M. Forster’s Maurice (Liverpool, 2020). He has also published articles on Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Humphrey Jennings, and life-writing.

Venkata Naresh Burla (Central University of Jharkhand, India)

Ghost Film Genre as an Effective Medium for Handling Crime and Fictional Narratives: A Comprehensive Study on Recent Movie Productions in South India

Crime and fictional narratives are always fascinating for young readers, and they tend to attract more viewers/ audience when they are presented in movies or TV serials. However, many crime and fictional narratives are inevitably associated with many supernatural entities as lead characters, such as ghosts, spirits, and local deities, whose task is almost to exact revenge on the crime perpetrators. The horror or ghost film genres are quite popular among the young and middle-aged audience as they generate so much curiosity for watching them, not only for the plots and stories but also for the techniques used and the unexpected twists and turns in the storylines. Though all crime and fictional narratives and movies have moral and ethical values as their foundations, they are viewed mostly for the way revenge is carried out, the culprits are punished, or the innocent or common people are being rescued by the protagonists from the evil forces. This article investigates the contemporary trend in the ghost film genres in the South Indian film industry, which is known worldwide for producing movies in different genres in the Dravidian languages such as Telugu (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Tamil (Tamil Nadu), Kannada (Karnataka), and Malayalam (Kerala). Apart from their respective states, the South Indian movies are popular worldwide. They have also recently been released in theatres around the world via OTT platforms or satellite screenings. Interestingly, popular movies are being either dubbed into or remade in other languages. By referring to the movies produced in the past ten years on the crime and fictional themes with ghosts or/and local deities as lead roles, this article makes an effort to understand various aspects associated with these movies such as uniqueness, reconstructing the notion of crime, evil and punishment, giving shape to fictional narratives, aesthetics of representation of paranormal entities, conception of rationilistatus of popular culture, etc. The movies such as Arundhati (telugu). Avunu (Telugu), Pisasu (Tamil), and Bhaagamathie (Tamil and Telugu) will also be included in the data corpus.

Venkata Naresh Burla is serving as Assistant Professor in the Centre for Performing Arts at the Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi (India). He has received his M.P.A. in Theatre Arts from University of Hyderabad and MAIPR (Erasmus Mundus) from University of Tampere, Finland and University of Amsterdam and he is currently pursuing his PhD from Dept. of Theatre Arts, University of Hyderabad. After the completion of his post-graduation, he has worked in the lighting stream, in Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bengaluru and also worked at Department of Theatre Arts, University of Hyderabad. To his credit, he has directed many plays and worked as designer for some plays. Gopal ki duniya and Macbeth are two plays directed by him in the University Campus that have been well-received by students, teaching and non-teaching staff and general public. He has coordinated number of academic programmes on Cultural Creative Expressions-Performing Arts and contributed many articles for few edited volumes and also taught in number of theatre and technical theatre workshops.

Verita Sriratana (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)

The Girl and the ‘Gothic’ Gun as a Feminist Noir beyond Feminist Noir: Framing Patriarchy, Necropolitics, Capitalism and Pathology of Violence

Babae at baril (2019), a directorial debut by the Rae Red, depicts a story of an unnamed woman who works as a salesclerk at a department store. Set in necropolitical Quezon City, viewers witness how she painfully faces sexism in many forms and on many levels, ranging from the boss who picks on her for her torn stockings, a group of men who shout from the street for her to smile, the male seller at the sari-sari store who hands her soiled (un)sanitary napkin, and her male colleague who brutally rapes her. This paper is an analysis of the gothic elements reflected in how Babae at baril appropriates film noir, which traditionally depicts the world through male gaze, not only to challenge noir’s tendency to feature, as main theme, violence as a means of vengeance, but also to deconstruct violence, capitalism and patriarchy in the Philippines, particularly in the context of Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. On the surface, Babae at baril seems to subscribe to the use of violence as a means of revenge and seems to depict the gun as source of female empowerment. However, Red avoids such clichés attached to film noir by carefully narrating the interwoven backstories of the gun prior to the moment when the woman comes to possess it. The nonlinear narrative takes viewers to the men whose lives have been changed by their decision to put that very weapon to use. The gun is clearly not only Chekhov’s, but also a gothic one.

Verita Sriratana is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. She is former Visiting Research Fellow in Human Rights at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI), Lund University. Verita researches in Gender, Necropolitics, Epistemic Violence, Postcolonial Studies and Modernist Studies. She was recently invited to deliver a lecture on the topic of ‘Decoloniality and Epistemic Violence in Thailand’s Current Pro-Democracy Movement: An Activist Academic’s Experience and Advocacy for Feminism and Marriage Equality’ at the Global Gender Matters International Workshop, Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, and to deliver a lecture on the topic of ‘Gender and Decoloniality in IR & Diplomacy’ for the ‘Women in Foreign Service’ course at the School of International Relations and Diplomacy, Anglo-American University in Prague (Summer School). Her forthcoming works include the Thai translation of Susan Sellers’s novel entitled Vanessa and Virginia (2008) and a research paper entitled ‘The Land of Smiles, Nazi Chic and Communist Cool: Personality Cult and ‘Democide & Holocaust Indifference’ in Thailand,’ to be published as part of the ‘Identifying and Countering Holocaust Distortion: Lessons for and from Southeast Asia’ project supported by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and Heinrich Böll Stiftung Cambodia. Verita currently works on a book which analyses misogyny as necropower and epistemic violence against LGBTQINA+ persons in Thailand and beyond.

Vik Gill (Falmouth University, UK)

‘I feel your pain’: How the Novel Form Uses Feminist Vigilantes or Vengeful Ghosts to Encourage Empathy for the Suffering of Women and Girls

Writing is a corporeal activity. We work ideas through our bodies; we write through our bodies, hoping to get into the bodies of our readers.

The female vengeful ghost and feminist vigilante have much in common as literary responses to male violence against women. This paper argues that the ‘feminist vigilante’ trope of transgressive crime fiction embodies the female rage that haunts the vengeful ghost in ghost stories, by transmuting female rage against patriarchy into a site of corporeal resistance. These commonalities offer opportunities for encouraging empathic responses to the novel’s feminist themes and characters. Both tropes offer opportunities for authors to produce imaginative visions of worlds where male violence against women and girls haunts the past but not the future.

Scholars have linked the reading of fiction specifically with measurable increases in empathy.  Indeed, one of the key objectives of fiction as arts-based research is the promulgation of empathy.  The novel form offers opportunities for creating an immersive experience for readers, allowing them to create connections between different events as the story progresses. Offering an extract from my work-in-progress doctoral novel, The Ghost of Vicarage Row, I will argue that feminist vigilantes and vengeful ghosts can be employed to develop a feminist narrative that encourages empathy for the suffering of women.

Vik Gill is a PhD student in the School of Communication at Falmouth University where she is working on a feminist supernatural Cornish Gothic novel. Key themes of her research include vengeful ghosts, feminist vigilantes, and Cornwall as a site for crime fiction. Other research interests include representations of older women’s selfhood, sexuality, and spirituality in transgressive, crime, and gothic fiction.