Li-hsin Hsu

Dr 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 guest-edited journal issues on transculture-related topics, including a special issue on “Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations: 1776 to the Present” for The Wenshan Review (June 2018), and a special issue on “International Dickinson: Scholarship in English Translation” for The Emily Dickinson Journal (Fall 2020). She has also contributed to a number of international journals and edited volumes, such as Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750-1918 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class, Empire (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), on topics related to space and race. She is currently guest-editing a special issue on “EcoGothic Asia” for the SARE journal and co-editing a special issue on “Asian Gothic” for The Wenshan Review (with Katarzyna Ancuta).

Katarzyna Ancuta

Dr 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. Katarzyna is the author of Where Angels Fear to Hover: Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror (2005) and her most recent publications include contributions to The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2017), B-Movie Gothic (2018), Twenty-First-Century Gothic (2019), Suicide and the Gothic (2019), Gothic and the Arts (2019) and The New Urban Gothic (2020). Katarzyna co-edited three special journal issues on Thai and Southeast Asian horror film and Tropical Gothic, and two edited collections: Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2018, with Mary J. Ainslie) and South Asian Gothic (2021, with Deimantas Valanciunas). She is currently co-editing a similar volume on Southeast Asian Gothic (with Mary J. Ainslie and Andrew Hock Soon Ng) and a journal special issue on Asian Gothic (with Hsu Li-hsin).

Intersections of Crime and the Gothic

The first Asian Captivating Criminality conference of the International Crime Fiction Association [ICFA] organised in cooperation with the Gothic in Asia Association [GAA] and the BALAC Programme of the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University.

Jeunesse

Jeunesse: young people, texts, cultures has a call for papers out. It’s a well-established children’s studies and children’s literature journal, with connections to the Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People (ARCYP), established at Winnipeg, but published at University of Toronto Press since 2021. It’s not a gothic journal, so if you have a more general interest in children and young people that works too.

https://www.utpjournals.press/journals/jeunesse/cfp

Is there a children’s or young adult (YA) gothic, horror etc. book, film, television show, or video game that you’d like to review – or an academic book on children’s or YA gothic you’d like to review? Jeunesse: young people, texts, cultures has a call for reviews out. It’s a well-established children’s studies and children’s literature journal, with connections to the Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People (ARCYP), established at Winnipeg, but published at University of Toronto Press since 2021. If you don’t have a text in mind to review, you could browse the list of books to see if anything interests you. It’s not a gothic journal, so if you have a more general interest in children and young people that works too.

https://www.utpjournals.press/journals/jeunesse/call-for-reviewers

Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century Symposium

Samantha Landau (The University of Tokyo, Japan) contributed a video lecture to the asynchronous portion of the Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century Symposium, which was held through Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and organized by Janice Deitner, Dara Downey, Stephen Matterson, and Bernice M. Murphy. The conference is dedicated to discussing and exploring the past and future of Jackson studies, as well as celebrating the life of the author herself. Academics and independent scholars from several countries were invited to contribute video lectures and short essays to the website; a synchronous component including round tables and panels was also featured.

The conference materials, including the live panels, were made free and open to the public, and were featured in The Irish Times in an article emphasizing the importance of Jackson’s literary legacy here

The conference website contains the asynchronous content and and recordings of the live panels that took place on December 14, 2021 and can be found here

Samantha Landau’s lecture, “Ritual and Contagion in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House” is available to the public on Youtube here

These Violent Delights

These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong. Young adult gothic-adjacent or Asian horror novels, these books retell something of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet story in the “melting-pot” of 1920s Shanghai. The young heirs of opposing Chinese and Russian emigree gangs do battle on city streets and across the foreign concessions. Then a bloody pandemic rages, leaving yet more mutilated corpses in the streets, that might require two dominating fathers ‘both alike in dignity’ and their extended families to cooperate towards a solution before their lucrative rackets collapse. Elements for dystopian and speculative fiction readers too (Sarah Olive, Bangor).

The Other City of Angels

The Other City of Angels by S.P Somtow is a modern retelling of the Gothic tale of Bluebeard’s wife and her fatal discovery of her husband’s dark secret. Filled in equal measures with romance, terror, and laughter, the novel portrays Bangkok as a Gothic metropolis: a city stuck between illusion and reality, where dreams and nightmares come to life, simultaneously backwards and modern, spiritual and material, and full of peculiarities that make one doubt whether such a place exists at all. (KA)

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is a collection of strange stories (the genre formally known as zhiguai) written by an eighteen-century Chinese writer and philosopher, Ji Yun. This lively contemporary translation by Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum, includes some great examples of early ghost stories that were instrumental in shaping supernatural tales in the region. (KA)

Ponti

Ponti by Sharlene Teo is a monster story with a difference. Set in contemporary Singapore, and told in three parallel narrative strands in roughly 20-year time intervals, the novel engages with the Malay mythology of the pontianak (a vengeful female spirit) which functions in the text as a reflection on the nature of monstrosity in relation to memory, femininity and motherhood. (KA)

Dream of Ding Village

Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke paints a bleak picture of the world created through the coupling of communist wastefulness with capitalist greed. Narrated by a ghost of a teenage boy murdered in an act of vengeance against his family, the novel offers a darkly satirical portrayal of the 1990s AIDS epidemic that engulfed several rural Chinese provinces in the aftermath of the government’s Plasma Economy campaign. (KA)