Research carried out by academics on the Gothic in Asia team

Folk Horror: New Global Pathways

A fantastic book for all the fans of folk horror out there, Folk Horror: New Global Pathways, edited by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt, is the first publication that situates folk horror as a global phenomenon, not limited to British or American cinema. The book includes chapters that extend folk horror’s geographic terrain to Italy, Ukraine, Thailand, Mexico and the Appalachian region of the US, among them a discussion on folk horror themes in popular Thai cinema by Katarzyna Ancuta.

More information about the book can be found on the publisher\’s website.

The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic

One of the most anticipated publications of 2024 is finally out, The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, edited by Rebecca Duncan, heralded as “the most substantial exploration to date of gothic fiction in the international context.” It includes a chapter on Asian Folklore and Globalgothic by Katarzyna Ancuta but there are plenty more exciting chapters to read. It’s a must have for anyone working on international, regional or indeed global gothic.

You can find more information about this book on the publisher’s website.

Special Issue of The Wenshan Review on Asian Gothic

The special issue of The Wenshan Review on Asian Gothic, co-edited by Li-hsin Hsu and Katarzyna Ancuta has been published. The review contains four papers on topics related to Indian, Thai and Japanese literature and film, authored by Suntisuk Prabunya, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Deimantas Valančiūnas and Anshuman Bora, as well as our introductory note \”Why do we need Asian Gothic?\” and a few other entries. All the articles can be downloaded from the journal website below.

Special Issue: Asian Gothic

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

Circulating Fear: Japanese Horror, Fractured Realities, and New Media

Circulating Fear: Japanese Horror, Fractured Realities, and New Media explores the changing role of screens, new media objects, and social media in Japanese horror films from the 2010s to present day. Lindsay Nelson places these films and their paratexts in the context of changes in the new media landscape that have occurred since J-horror\’s peak in the early 2000s; in particular, the rise of social media and the ease of user remediation through platforms like YouTube and Niconico. This book demonstrates how Japanese horror film narratives have shifted their focus from old media—video cassettes, TV, and cell phones—to new media—social media, online video sharing, and smart phones. In these films, media devices and new media objects exist both inside and outside the frame: they are central to the films’ narratives, but they are also the means through which the films are consumed and disseminated. Across a multitude of screens, platforms, devices, and perspectives, Nelson argues, contemporary Japanese horror films are circulated as an ever-shifting series of images and fragments, creating a sense of “fractured reality” in the films’ narratives and the media landscape that surrounds them. Scholars of film studies, horror studies, media studies, and Japanese studies will find this book particularly useful.

Book release

Gothic Monsters in East Asian Culture

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

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