York Explore Library :

Wed 26 Sep :

6.30pm – 7.30pm :

£5

An introduction to the origins of the literary Gothic in eighteenth-century Britain, discussing how three particular novels helped to define the terms in which the home and family have subsequently been represented in Gothic literature, art and film.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve and A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe demonstrate that the Gothic is nothing if not a self-referential mode, and this talk will be illustrated with literary and visual examples of its strange and (sometimes) funny as well as frightening metamorphoses over the past 250 years. Along the way it will ask what we mean when we refer to a cultural artefact as ‘Gothic’.

Author’s Biography:
Jim Watt teaches in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge UP, 1999) and of essays and articles on the Gothic and other topics. His latest book British Orientalisms, 1759-1835 is forthcoming with Cambridge UP.

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