5th

TOPIC: MYSTERY - TERROR - THE SUPERNATURAL - THE SENSATIONAL
             IN 18th- AND 19th-CENTURY BRITAIN

DATE: November 25, 2016

COORDINATORS: Dr hab. Jacek Mydla and Dr hab. Małgorzata Nitka, 
                                   University of Silesia, Katowice-Sosnowiec

DEADLINES: 

• proposals (about 200 words) - September 20
• complete papers - November 10

CfP SUGGESTED TOPICS & THEMES:

•  mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational in their proper historical contexts; literary and non-literary sources of these narrative forms and devices; the literary as a cultural parasite: literary works feeding on society and culture;
• 18th- and 19th-century critical and “ideological” responses to mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational;
• generic diversifications and cross-fertilisations: the mundane and the supernatural varieties of the horror story, the ghost story, the detective story, the crime (transgression) story, the weird tale; births and declines of modes and genres (e.g. the Gothic drama, the classic ghost story);
• the new quasi-scientific and “Darwinian” motifs and tropes: the abject, the sub/ab/trans-human; mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational as offering (making possible) new types of the sublime;
• mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational as means to popularity; circulation, popularisation and the literary marketplace; reader-response and material-culture approaches to these phenomena and processes;
• 18th- and 19th-century story-telling practices (narrative devices used to create mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational) in dialogue with 20th/21st-century narratology/narrative theory;
• contemporary (esp. late-20th- and 21st-century) methods of “conceptualising” and “theorising” mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational; gender-focused approaches to the genre-defining themes and devices;
• mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational as ways to address and express social and cultural anxieties, esp. those aroused by the crisis and failure of dominant ideologies (e.g. scientism and utilitarianism); the idea of “cultural repression” as a method to theorise these phenomena: the so-called anxiety approach to horrific and fantastic fictions and its (this approach’s) limitations;
• mystery, terror, the supernatural and the sensational on the move; the literary forms and modes in the context of cross-fertilisation and cross-breeding and of intertextuality and intermediality; the adaptation and its discontents.

PROGRAMME

10.00-11.00 Plenary lecture
Chair: Grażyna Bystydzieńska 

Jeremy Tambling, 

Mystery and an Unknown Fear: 
Gothic Interventions from Ann Radcliffe to Dickens, and Opera

11.30-12:30 Session I
Chair: Małgorzata Nitka

Ilona Dobosiewicz
“Though I was alone with the unseen, I comprehended it not”: The relationship between the dead and the living in Margaret Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City

Monika Mazurek
Turrets and trapdoors: Haunted spaces of Catholicism

13:00-14:00: Session II
Chair: Jacek Mydla

Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska
Between the supernatural and the superficial: Reimagining Dorian Gray

Anna Gutowska
From a damsel in distress to a worthy opponent: the progress of female agency in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) and Penny Dreadful (2014-2016)

15:30-16:30 Session III
Chair: Chair: Ilona Dobosiewicz

Małgorzata Nitka
“The advancing eclipse of the brain.” Sensation, Detection, and the Unconscious in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and The Lady

Jacek Mydla
Narrative progression and Gothic suspense in Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret

17:00-18:00 Session IV
Chair:Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska

Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Read (and watch) all about it: Reporting the Ripper murders in The Lodger and its screen adaptations

Przemysław Uściński
Chains, castles, Gothic terror(s) and Blake’s Urizen

Plenary lecture: room 131

Sessions: room 345
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