Bill Hughes | The University of Sheffield (original) (raw)

Books by Bill Hughes

In the Company of Wolves , 2020

"This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media t... more "This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, race, genre, technology, consumption and social change.

A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire’s origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siècle decadence, Nazi Germany and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola’s film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, Goth subculture, young adult fiction and cinema are dealt with in discussions of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and much more.

Featuring distinguished contributors, including a prominent novelist, and aimed at interdisciplinary scholars or postgraduate students, it will also appeal to aficionados of creative writing and Undead enthusiasts."

Papers by Bill Hughes

University of Hertfordshire, 8‒10 April 2021 As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of ... more University of Hertfordshire, 8‒10 April 2021 As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’ and ‘and favour those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject’. Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), talks of ‘the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies’. ‘Horror’ and ‘terror’ are key terms of affect in Gothic criticism; Townsend urges us, however, to move away from this dichotomy. While we are certainly interested in the darker aspects of fairies and the fear they may induce, this conference also welcomes attention to that aspect of Gothic that invokes wonder and enchantment.

Manchester University Press eBooks, Feb 5, 2020

In the company of wolves, 2020

The International Journal of Young Adult Literature

Optics is perhaps the ruling science of the Gothic mode. Themes of light and darkness, obscurity ... more Optics is perhaps the ruling science of the Gothic mode. Themes of light and darkness, obscurity and illumination, flourish in the genre, resonating with Edmund Burke’s explorations in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry, which was contemporary with the rise of the Gothic novel, and with the central symbol of Enlightenment itself (with which Gothic narratives always contend in various ways). Gothic monsters come with conventions that help act as genre markers; one of the most familiar of these conventions is an optical one: the vampire’s lack of reflection in mirrors. Vampire fictions continually play with the attributes of the vampire as passed on from folklore or established as conventions in prior narratives; the aversion to sunlight or garlic, the vulnerabilities to sacred symbols, and so on, are all discarded, modified, or rationalized in various ways in each incarnation.1 Given the centrality of optics in Gothic narratives, one such attribute, the motif of non-reflection, is likely...

You are cordially invited to a special event to celebrate ten years of the Open Graves, Open Mind... more You are cordially invited to a special event to celebrate ten years of the Open Graves, Open Minds project and to launch our new book In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children. In the Company of Wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children, and werewolves as portrayed in different media and genres. The book begins with the wolf itself as it has been interpreted as a cultural symbol and how it figures in contemporary debates about wilderness and nature. Alongside this, we consider eighteenth-century debates about wild children ¬- often thought to have been raised by wolves and other animals – and their role in key questions about the origins of language and society. The collection continues with essays on werewolves and other shapeshifters as depicted in folk tales, literature, film and TV, concluding with the...

Young Adult dark romance is often more questioning than its adult counterpart; different, less co... more Young Adult dark romance is often more questioning than its adult counterpart; different, less constraining commercial imperatives are perhaps at work, or readers' expectations less fixed. This chapter will show how, woven into a sensitive coming-of-age narrative of first love and familial problems, Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver trilogy performs a far more sophisticated interrogation of the boundaries of animality and humanity than other such fictions, highlighting the centrality of language and its relationship to agency. The hero, Sam's, struggle with his lupine nature becomes an existentialist refusal to be defined by nature; other characters are tempted instead to yield to a fatalistic surrender of will. The books are tantalisingly ambivalent about the appeal of the instinctual and the borderline between an embodied humanity and the animal, particularly as manifested in the love affair of the teenage protagonists. For Marcuse, the surplus-repression of the proximity sen...

This thesis analyses printed eighteenth-century dialogues in English. It considers them amidst th... more This thesis analyses printed eighteenth-century dialogues in English. It considers them amidst the dialogic nature of cultural life in eighteenth-century Britain more widely. It argues that many printed dialogues successfully imagine, or fruitfully engage with imagined, ideal speech situations. In addition it argues that these texts had a sophistication that stemmed from a dialogicity enabled by the growth of the public sphere. It is alert to novelistic features of dialogues: characterisation, verisimilitude, narrative inter-est. That is important for this thesis, as the richness of eighteenth-century dialogues plays an important part in the formation of the early English novel. Chapter 1 explores eighteenth-century theories of language, many of which posit an originary dialogue. I consider Mandeville’s theories in The Fable of the Bees, James Harris’s Hermes, Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language, and, briefly, Horne Tooke. Chapter 2 considers the consensual aspects of ...

Vampire literature since Le Fanu at least has been conspicuously about 'Otherness', that ... more Vampire literature since Le Fanu at least has been conspicuously about 'Otherness', that crucial term of identity politics, and has thus rendered itself most obligingly to interpretation in terms of those politics—at least, since the rise of that paradigm in cultural analysis, it has been available to be read that way. Appearing deceptively human, animated, yet without a soul, vampires have conveniently represented alterity, whether foreignness or deviant sexuality, or both. Lately, zombies have been spotted lurching alongside their fellow undead in greater numbers, embodying otherness in a different, perhaps less exotic manner. But it was in Joss Wheedon's Buffyverse (at a time, the 1990s, when identity politics in the US and Western world generally became mainstream) that we first saw a world where different undead cultures interact, are tolerated if not granted legal status, or are persecuted for their difference, particularly in Angel, with the Caritas nightclub, or in the various demon joints in Buffy. On the basis of these possibilities, later texts imagine the consequences of the claims to citizenship of the undead—and two kinds of responses that reveal very common stances on contemporary identity politics: a liberal one and a conservative one. The undead may be legally recognised, or they maybe neglected or even persecuted by the State. I shall examine these polarities in books from two series: the Southern Vampire novels by Charlene Harris (rather than the HBO True Blood adaptation for TV, which handles these themes rather differently), and the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton. I then consider one of the most dialectically subtle of recent presentations of undead would-be citizens: Daniel Waters's Generation Dead novel for young adults avoids making obvious points or mechanically allegorising, and reveal the potential illiberal menace of the State, yet also dares to mock certain platitudes of liberal tolerance of difference.

""This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and ot... more ""This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, race, genre, technology, consumption and social change. A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire’s origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siècle decadence, Nazi Germany and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola’s film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, Goth subculture, young adult fiction and cinema are dealt with in discussions of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and much more. Featuring distinguished contributors, including a prominent novelist, and aimed at interdisciplinary scholars or postgraduate students, it will also appeal to aficionados of creative writing and Undead enthusiasts.""

After 50 years, what are the implications of Uses of Literacy for educational modernisation, in t... more After 50 years, what are the implications of Uses of Literacy for educational modernisation, in the light of subsequent changes from 'read only' literacy to 'read-write' uses of multimedia? This chapter argues that a broad extension of popular literacy via consumer-created digital content offers not only emancipationist potential in line with Hoggart's own project, but also economic benefits via the dynamics of creative innovation. Multimedia 'popular entertainments' pose a challenge to formal education, but not in the way that Hoggart feared. Instead of producing 'tamed helots,' commercial culture may be outpacing formal schooling in promoting creative digital literacy via entrepreneurial and distributed learning. It may indeed be that those in need of a creative make-over are not teenagers but teachers.

As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairie... more As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole's 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of 'the fairy kind of writing' which, for Addison, 'raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader' and 'and favour those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject'. Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), talks of 'the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies'. 'Horror' and 'terror' are key terms of affect in Gothic criticism; Townsend urges us, however, to move away from this dichotomy. While we are certainly interested in the darker aspects of fairies and the fear they may induce, this conference also welcomes attention to that aspect of Gothic that invokes wonder and enchantment.

Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community, 2011

Serials, 2011

The literary world is replete with examples of relationships between works such as Homer’s Odysse... more The literary world is replete with examples of relationships between works such as Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses.A Linked Data approach offers the opportunity to categorize these relationships then make them openly available and easily discoverable. The most suitable framework for categorizing these relationships (which can be applied across all cultural output) is provided by Gérard Genette, who proposes five types of relationship. In this paper, we examine Genette’s framework, then apply it to Jane Eyre and relationships around that novel. By so doing,we have produced some RDF to model these relationships following Linked Data principles. This case study demonstrates the broader benefits of adopting Linked Data in this area of literary criticism – namely that scholars will be able to share discoveries and insights, laypeople will discover additional cultural artefacts of interest, and a clear and granular picture of cultural history will be openly available to everyone.

In the Company of Wolves , 2020

Manchester University Press eBooks, Feb 5, 2020

In the company of wolves, 2020

The International Journal of Young Adult Literature

Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community, 2011

Serials, 2011

Loss of habitat and human exploitation have driven many turtle species to the brink of extinction... more Loss of habitat and human exploitation have driven many turtle species to the brink of extinction, particularly in many parts of southern Asia. The spiny turtle (Heosemys spinosa) is a terrestrial species distributed throughout the Sundaland region of SouthEast Asia. Despite international legislative protection, H. spinosa continues to be illegally collected for the food and traditional medicine markets of China. Given its widespread distribution, taxonomists have reasonably questioned whether H. spinosa truly represents a single evolutionary lineage or multiple undiagnosed species. Recently, a large and illegal shipment of rare, wild-caught H. spinosa was confiscated in Hong Kong, China, and the turtles were eventually distributed to several zoos and academic collections. Based on analyses of these individuals, along with additional individuals from the pet trade and museum collections, we found concordant genetic and phenotypic variation, indicating that two distinct types of H. spinosa exist in this collection of turtles. Further characterization of this variation will require field surveys and the collection of additional morphological and genetic data from specimens of known geographic provenance. However, our data indicate that this highly exploited, endangered species may contain additional cryptic taxa, and emphasize the critical need for systematic evaluation of species before unrecognized variation is lost forever.

Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community, 2011

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2011

Open Graves, Open Minds 'Ill Met By Moonlight' , 2021

‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realm in literature and... more ‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realm in literature and culture

University of Hertfordshire, 8‒11 April 2021

In the Company of Wolves, 2020

We’ve been posting about the book launch for OGOM’s latest publication, In the Company of Wolves:... more We’ve been posting about the book launch for OGOM’s latest publication, In the Company of Wolves: Wolves, Werewolves, and Wild Children. If you attend the book launch, you will be able to buy the book at 50% discount (possibly more–it’s still being discussed!). The book launch (more details here) is 29 February 2020 at the fabulous Art Deco cinema, The Odyssey in St Albans and you need to book here for the event. As part of the launch, where you will be able to meet some of the contributors to this excellent collection of essays, Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves will be shown (based on Angela Carter’s wonderful ‘Red Riding Hood’/werewolf tales).

Dialogue, as much as the novel, may be the dominant genre of the eighteenth century. This was a p... more Dialogue, as much as the novel, may be the dominant genre of the eighteenth century. This was a period that featured and valued dialogue, sustained through the institutions described by Jürgen Habermas as the public sphere; the genre itself proliferated and permeates and modulates the novel. The novel is almost defined by its generic hybridity and many eighteenth-century novels, feature embodied dialogues. The dialogue was revitalised and gained new energies amidst the political controversies and tensions of the late century and the dialogue form appears embedded in many novels, particularly ‘Jacobin’ novels of the late century. However, it is noticeably absent from the Gothic novel. Is then Gothic against this spirit of communicative rationality; against Enlightenment, as some argue?

However, Ann Radcliffe’s last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, is introduced by a frame narrative which slips in and out of formal dialogue; a sceptic and a romantic enthusiast discuss aesthetics, superstition, realist representation, and politics. Radcliffe also wrote a dialogue, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, following the earlier model of Clara Reeve’s dialogue The Progress of Romance. This alerts us to the possibility of dialogism elsewhere. I argue that Radcliffe is still very much concerned with the rational argumentation advocated by the Enlightenment and that her frequent use of the word ‘conjectures’ is one clue to this.

Radcliffe, who talks of the ‘forking paths’ of narrative, might be almost as fond of labyrinths as Jorge Louis Borges (she has a ‘labyrinth of misfortune’ and a ‘labyrinth of vice’ in A Sicilian Romance). In the phrase ‘labyrinths of conjectures’ (The Romance of the Forest), Radcliffe associates winding explorations of landscape, architecture, and plot itself with evaluations of modes of argument. Radcliffe’s heroines wander through literal and metaphorical labyrinths, exercising their reason to penetrate the gloom and illuminate the twistings and abrupt concealments of the plots they are subjected to. They are troubled by conjecture, particularly over phenomena (hence, the oft-observed resolution of the marvellous in favour of rational causality), but also over moral arguments and judicial processes, and aesthetic values. Jürgen Habermas, in his analysis of the dialogic process of communicative reason, talks of three types of ‘validity claims’ that may be raised: over factual truth, moral rightness, and aesthetic authenticity. His schema, this paper argues, can illuminate the process of conjecture in Radcliffe’s works.

This paper will unveil some of Radcliffe’s different engagements with dialogism and show how the dialogic spirit colours her writings. This is manifested through an emphasis on rational and mutual conversation but most of all through conjectural evaluations of validity claims infused with the imagery of convoluted plots and winding journeys fraught with obscurity and aporias. Thus the paper stresses Radcliffe’s rationalism at the expense of her adventures into the irrational (without, however, dismissing that other strand, which has already been much explored). Radcliffe’s ‘conjectural labyrinths’ are resolved according to Enlightenment principles of human reason over passion and superstition, illumination over obscurity, and this resolution takes place communicatively through dialogue.

The Twilight phenomenon has made us aware of a new kind of story about monsters. In these narrati... more The Twilight phenomenon has made us aware of a new kind of story about monsters. In these narratives the protagonist, instead of fleeing from it in terror or hunting it down, embraces the monster. Twilight was not the first of these tales (nor the best) and sparkly vampires are not the only demonic lovers. But despite a long history of monstrous couplings in literature, myth, and folklore, a distinct contemporary genre has emerged, called variously paranormal romance, dark romance, Gothic romance, or dark fantasy (though the definitions are imprecise and shift in reference).

The best known incarnation of this present-day demon lover is the sympathetic vampire, who was probably the first of these paranormal paramours to emerge from the shadows. But werewolves, angels, demons, fairies, trolls, cyborgs, and even the unlikely zombie have become objects of desire in these fictions (in film and TV as well as novels).

Such novels appeal to (or seem intended for) a mainly female and often young adult readership, which has led to some belittlement. But many of them are daringly creative, often questioning, and can be stylishly crafted with considerable literary care. Their presence is of more than sociological interest and the rise of new genres—new possibilities for writing and seeing, in other words—is itself of interest to those who value literature.

Literary monsters nearly always represent some kind of otherness—groups of people or sets of values deemed threatening to some elements of society. Their outsider status may be owing to class, ethnicity, or sexuality. Genres—kinds of writing—themselves correspond to different sets of values and different ways of knowing or looking at the world.

In this talk, I will be giving an overview of the wide range of these stories of loving what is dangerous, alien, and terrifying. I’ll give a brief account of how paranormal romance emerges out of an uncanny mating of the familiar scary Gothic horror and the oft-despised genre of romantic fiction (and other genres, too). Here, we can see what the collision of different perspectives can achieve and how it might be appealing. Through these novels, I’ll show what monsters may mean in today’s culture and what the dangerous loving of them might signify.

Dialogue dominated the cultural life of eighteenth-century Britain, and both as the spirit of wha... more Dialogue dominated the cultural life of eighteenth-century Britain, and both as the spirit of what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘communicative reason’ and as a genre, played an important role in the novel. In particular, formal dialogues can be found embedded therein, especially in the ‘Jacobin’ novels of the century’s close where, crucially, they centred on women’s aspirations both for inclusivity and for rational companionship. The conservative response to this often employed satire as a counter-genre to dialogue. Yet satire has an ambivalent position with regard to dialogue; it is profoundly undialogic in that it wilfully distorts the speech of the other party yet it can unmask oppressively monologic discourse. It may be that when wielded by the oppressed its dialogic character prevails, so when women are satirical these questions come into play.

Conservative responses to the ‘Jacobin’ novels themselves employed the dialogue as a constituent unit, though the embedded genre often becomes parodied, satirising the enlightened dialogue of intellectual courtship. In the anti-Jacobin novels, the courtship of equals becomes distorted into the strategic action of the rapacious (and rationalist) male seducing the artless female victim.

Elizabeth Hamilton, in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), dramatises this kind of distortion. Her Rousseauvian heroine of sensibility, Julia, is seduced by the Jacobin, Vallaton. Distorted lovers’ dialogues take place between Vallaton and Julia, parodies of the rational exchanges between lovers found in Robert Bage or Thomas Holcroft (though the principal target is Mary Hays). Thus Hamilton revisits the interplay between courtship and intellectual debate of the radical writers, but in order to show the dangers of dialogue; the courtship dialogue is the means by which Jacobins possess both female minds and bodies.

However, much of Hamilton’s critique is of the bourgeois individualism of the new philosophy, where ‘All compose themselves; all play their own tune; no two in the same key’. The socialised sensibility of Shaftesbury has become egotistical and private in the likes of Bridgetina Botherim, the satirised Godwinian, threatening social order. Here, the potential to subvert dialogic mutuality concerns Hamilton though, of course, her fears of the overturning of rank and property motivate the novel. My paper shows how Hamilton’s satire ambivalently serves both the monologic and sociality.

Everyone knows that the vampire has certain inescapable traits—sunlight, garlic, etc. Each vampir... more Everyone knows that the vampire has certain inescapable traits—sunlight, garlic, etc. Each vampire narrative, since each age has its own, toys with these, highlighting some, embarrassed by others. But we have found a particular appeal in the vampire’s lack of reflection or shadow. Vampiric art and fiction have employed this to explore the very idea of representation itself. It takes on added force when the medium is film or TV; early film used the shadow to bestow uncanny significance, and present-day visual media continues that interest with much self-awareness. Lately, we have seen the rise of the sympathetic vampire; we might assume that as the vampire gains a voice it also gains a reflection. This is only partially true; the non-reflection motif still plays its part.

This paper examines the trope and looks at how one of the most inventive vampire storytellers plays with it—Joss Whedon in the shadow-haunted, noir-ish Angel. Representation, as in the realist work of art, is akin to and often synonymous with reflection. In the episode ‘Eternity’, the reflection motif is signalled immediately through Cordelia’s terrible acting in Ibsen’s realist drama, The Doll’s House. The plot concerns an actress afraid of growing old and wanting the immortality of the vampire. The non-reflection of the vampire becomes a device to explore the utopian temptation of overcoming death and age (as also in one moment in Twilight), and simultaneously a self-conscious and witty reflection on the nature of celebrity and of TV itself.

Contemporary Gothic, in the newly-emerged subgenre of paranormal romance, is countercultural in i... more Contemporary Gothic, in the newly-emerged subgenre of paranormal romance, is countercultural in intriguing new ways, taking on a new relationship with the Enlightenment refracted through postmodern suspicions. To be countercultural today is often to embrace, resurrect, and continue the Enlightenment project, recognising with Habermas that the problem is that the project was incomplete. Paranormal romance, despite its commercial success, is often countercultural in this way (though ambivalently).

The genre emerged as a new avatar of Horace Walpole’s attempt to fuse ‘two kinds of romance’ as Gothic novel—the mythic strain of Romance proper, with its ‘imagination, visions and passions’, and what later becomes the novel, committed to the quotidian and to psychological verisimilitude. To this may be added a third kind of romance, the everyday sense of ‘romantic fiction’; here, involving the amorous relations of mortal and paranormal creatures, well-known to us through Twilight.

Genres are closely bound up with perspectives, with ways of knowing or questioning. The uneasy mating of romance and novel, paranormal and human, enables a dialogue between the different epistemologies of Enlightenment and its discontents.

This paper will explore how ‘two kinds of romance’, plus a third, enable an exploration of dominant postmodern perspectives and the counterculture that is Enlightenment.

For much of the eighteenth century, English literature celebrated social interaction through noti... more For much of the eighteenth century, English literature celebrated social interaction through notions of politeness and sociability and, as Habermas’s early work argues, an ideal of unconstrained dialogue in the public sphere. Unsurprisingly, the dialogue was an immensely popular genre—dialogues were written on all manner of subjects and attained a surprising sophistication. Its rival was, of course, the emerging novel, but the eighteenth-century learnt much from the dialogue, which often informs its structure, being one of the many component genres at work there.

But at the end of the century, social contradictions concealed behind the often-strained benignity of the public sphere suddenly become visible. Democracy is argued about vigorously in the 1790s, often in dialogue form, but the dialogue cannot maintain its polite veneer and it moves towards its logomachic pole, as a rising working class becomes more vocal (and as some argue, creates an alternative public sphere). Curiously, however, this antagonism reinvigorates authentic dialogicity elsewhere. Here, it is useful to employ Habermas’s later work, which contrasts mutual communicative reason with strategic action, where speech becomes manipulative. Gary Kelly has noted the presence of embedded dialogues in ‘Jacobin’ novels; my paper will explore the different modalities of speech exchanges in the novels of writers such as Thomas Holcroft and Robert Bage, and in radical dialogues by Thomas Spence, Thomas Day, and Sir William Jones. These writers expose the hostility towards dialogism of the ruling classes with wit and passion whilst cultivating authentic connections—particularly between the sexes.

Conversation featured prominently in eighteenth-century life—and in literature, too, where conver... more Conversation featured prominently in eighteenth-century life—and in literature, too, where conversations are critically examined, often through a metadiscourse of conversation about conversation. Frances Burney’s concern with sociability and conversation is evident in her novels; I will show that conversation there very often approaches the communicative reason examined by Jürgen Habermas or, conversely, represents satirically the distortion of it. In Habermas, communicative reason examines through dialogue three types of validity claims, of truth, moral rightness, and sincerity. Burney’s characters evaluate such claims in discourse, and her heroines aspire towards rational conversation. Authentic and rational conversation is, in Burney, set up against and implicitly evaluated against a kind of speech that has become debased by commerce, distorting it into what Habermas calls strategic action. There, other people—particularly women—are only valued for their exchange value in the newly-established marketplace of eighteenth-century England. The aspiration towards an ideal dialogicity is intimately bound up with the quest for mutuality in love that informs the plots. This is a feature of many novels of the period and is not confined to women writers, but it takes on extra significance in women’s writing, where the plot motif could almost allegorise women writers’ search for respectful dialogue with an ideal reader. My paper will perform an analysis of the pragmatics of Burney’s language; how embedded dialogic situations in Cecilia pursue authenticity and amatory mutuality through the appraisal of validity claims and where various personas, including Burney herself, expose the invalidity and inauthenticity of commodified language. This critical language is highly specific to the historical conditions of eighteenth-century public life, which was itself highly communicative, as Habermas’s earlier work showed, but haunted by monetary insecurity. The credit of financial commerce and the credibility of commerce (in its other, discursive, sense) between people are crucially intertwined in the process of validation.

There is a concern in many eighteenth-century novels with the kind of authentic ideal speech, unc... more There is a concern in many eighteenth-century novels with the kind of authentic ideal speech, unconstrained and mutually rational, theorized in the later work of Jürgen Habermas. This reflects the contemporaneous popularity of the dialogue as a genre and the material institutions of the public sphere that fostered such free and rational discourse. In authors such as Maria Edgeworth, who extended Enlightenment values to a concern for rational companionship between the sexes, this is often clearly gendered. Jane Austen continued this trend: her novels feature embedded dialogues where moral claims and aesthetic values are earnestly evaluated. But there is a second treatment of conversational pragmatics, more prominent in Austen than earlier novelists. To the notion of communicative reason, where subjects engage dialogically and openly, Habermas opposes strategic action, which frequently distorts speech in order to conceal and manipulate. In the social context of early nineteenth-century English society, Austen reveals that, unlike the use of strategic action by the powerful as a hegemonic tool, it can be a necessary instrument for the defence of female autonomy where ideal speech would be censored or punished. This paper shows how dialogic pragmatics is especially prominent in Sense and Sensibility, whose very title suggests a dialogue. In the novel, there are fervent conversations concerning taste and ethics, formally homologous with the many contemporary printed dialogues on these themes. The concern for authenticity and mutuality between the sexes is evident. But, in contrast, the consequences of sincerity and the need for strategic concealment in female speech are made equally clear.

The dialogue was a phenomenally popular genre during the early eighteenth century, taking on a ri... more The dialogue was a phenomenally popular genre during the early eighteenth century, taking on a richness and sophistication rarely seen before apart from the masters such as Plato, Cicero, and Erasmus. The eighteenth century was a period of intensely dialogic activity, with a public sphere embodied in and aided by the expansion of print, coffee-houses, journals, public lectures, and cultural formations such as the Lunar Society, aspiring towards an equal and mutually inspirational exchange of ideas, free from constraints. So it’s not surprising that production and consumption of the printed dialogue flourished amidst the general expansion of commerce in pleasurable goods. This actual commerce of ideas, reflecting the open market of the new consumer-oriented capitalism, could be represented in a form that ensured their even greater circulation.

But, of course, the famously dominant genre in this period was the novel. The Soviet thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin elevated the novel above all other genres for its dialogic nature; I argue that, in part, the novel is dialogic in a more literal sense and that the eighteenth-century dialogue develops alongside the early novel, overlaps with it, and becomes a constituent element of it. Thus many novels of the period have embedded formal dialogues within them. In fact, the eighteenth-century dialogue is so variegated, and the early novel so multiform and unclassifiable, that it is not just that the dialogue influences the novel, or that dialogue becomes an important component of the novel, but that the two genres overlap considerably.

There were always undercurrents of antagonism behind these sociable exchanges that revealed unresolved divisions in society, but these emerged into open polemic during the 1790s against the background of the French Revolution and dawning working-class consciousness. Dialogues now became openly confrontational in a manner not seen since the period of the seventeenth-century English revolution. Yet some of these radical writings envisaged rational, harmonious communication in a new form alongside the polemicism.

One concern of liberal novelists, those with an interest in women’s aspirations in particular, was the exploration of more egalitarian relationships between the sexes, where mutual attraction also involved mutual intellectual regard. Amorous relations are typically the stuff of the novel and certain novelists envisaged an enlightened commerce of the sexes, finding the incorporation of the formal dialogue a suitable medium for fusing erotic and philosophical speech. Wooing fuses with dialectic as a prelude to an egalitarian and companionate marriage.

My talk will illustrate the fascination of this extraordinarily dialogic age and conclude with the reformulation of dialogue in the radical novels of the 1790s.

Vampire literature since Le Fanu at least has been conspicuously about ‘Otherness’, that crucial ... more Vampire literature since Le Fanu at least has been conspicuously about ‘Otherness’, that crucial term of identity politics, and has thus rendered itself most obligingly to interpretation in terms of those politics—at least, since the rise of that paradigm in cultural analysis, it has been available to be read that way. Appearing deceptively human, animated, yet without a soul, vampires have conveniently represented alterity, whether foreignness or deviant sexuality, or both. Lately, zombies have been spotted lurching alongside their fellow undead in greater numbers, embodying otherness in a different, perhaps less exotic manner.

But it was in Joss Wheedon’s Buffyverse (at a time, the 1990s, when identity politics in the US and Western world generally became mainstream) that we first saw a world where different undead cultures interact, are tolerated if not granted legal status, or are persecuted for their difference, particularly in Angel, with the Caritas nightclub, or in the various demon joints in Buffy.

On the basis of these possibilities, later texts imagine the consequences of the claims to citizenship of the undead—and two kinds of responses that reveal very common stances on contemporary identity politics: a liberal one and a conservative one. The undead may be legally recognised, or they maybe neglected or even persecuted by the State. I shall examine these polarities in books from two series: the Southern Vampire novels by Charlene Harris (rather than the HBO True Blood adaptation for TV, which handles these themes rather differently), and the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton.

I then consider one of the most dialectically subtle of recent presentations of undead would-be citizens: Daniel Waters’s Generation Dead novel for young adults avoids making obvious points or mechanically allegorising, and reveal the potential illiberal menace of the State, yet also dares to mock certain platitudes of liberal tolerance of difference.

The printed dialogue as a literary genre was highly popular in eighteenth-century Britain and att... more The printed dialogue as a literary genre was highly popular in eighteenth-century Britain and attained a richness and sophistication, and a diversity of subject matter unlike other eras. The growth of the public sphere and the ensuing dialogism of society rendered this a peculiarly appropriate genre for this age. But, of course, the famously dominant genre was the novel. It is well known that Mikhail Bakhtin elevates the novel above all other genres for its dialogic nature; I argue that, in part, the novel is dialogic in a more literal sense and that the eighteenth-century dialogue develops alongside the early novel, overlaps with it, and becomes a constituent element of it. Thus many novels of the period have embedded formal dialogues within them.
One concern of liberal novelists, those with an interest in women’s aspirations in particular, was the exploration of more egalitarian relationships between the sexes, where mutual attraction also involved mutual intellectual regard. Amorous relations are typically the stuff of the novel and certain novelists envisaged an enlightened commerce of the sexes, finding the incorporation of the formal dialogue a suitable medium for fusing erotic and philosophical speech. Wooing fuses with dialectic as a prelude to an egalitarian and companionate marriage.
Educational writers such as Maria and Richard Edgeworth were committed to dialogic theories of paedagogy; the many educational dialogues written during these years were genuinely open-ended and not the monologic catechisms of other periods, as various writers have shown. The Edgeworths even transcribed actual dialogues with children in Practical Education. Thus we might expect to find that, in Maria Edgeworth’s own novels, the absorption of the dialogue into the novel was coloured by her own educational concerns.
The ‘domestic utopia’ of the Perceval family in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is an instance of the kind of companionate marriage envisaged above. However, the dialogue extends to the whole family, making the links with the Edgeworths’ dialogical paedagogy evident. A constant interplay of educational dialogue between children and parents takes place where the children pursue questions of natural science and of ethics through authentically non-catechistical communication. This episode novelises the familial, paedagogical dialogues that Maria and her father had investigated as a foundation of their educational theory.
Edgeworth’s dialogic interests do not rest there. There are also formal intellectual dialogues between Belinda and, adversarially, Harriet Freke over her distorted variety of feminism; and as a Socratic conversation about lovers with Lady Delacour, thus exploring the terrain of intellectual love that I have identified in the practice of wooing—here, though, as the subject of metadiscourse between women.
This paper will explore the different modalities of dialogic argumentation and education in Edgeworth’s Belinda.

"Richard Hoggart stressed the importance of literary criticism in cultural studies. What may seem... more "Richard Hoggart stressed the importance of literary criticism in cultural studies. What may seem an antitheoretical empiricism—a common criticism made about Hoggart—is, in fact, a recognition of the concreteness of culture, and his work moves between the particularisation that literary criticism brings to the fore and the scientific, sociological attitude. It is thus not at all untheoretical and is genuinely dialectical.

Part of Hoggart’s concern with literature is an affirmation of the idea of literary value and, recently, an attack on relativism. This affirmation is in turn concerned with the power of great literature to complement the generalisations of sociology by concretely dramatising the spirit of a culture.

In addition, literature for Hoggart is a counterbalance to instrumental reason, as shown in his later polemics against philistinism. Thus, literate sociology is more than an analytical method: it is a principled and critical stance against the dehumanisation of society.

This paper shows how Hoggart practices this literate sociology from The Uses of Literacy through Speaking to Each Other whose very structure, divided as it is into a volume on Literature and one on Society, displays this dialectic, to the polemics of The Way We Live Now.
"

"The dialogue was a phenomenally popular genre during the early eighteenth century, taking on a s... more "The dialogue was a phenomenally popular genre during the early eighteenth century, taking on a sophistication rarely seen before apart from the masters such as Plato, Cicero, and Erasmus. The genre embodies the actual dialogic spirit of the period, characterized in Habermas’s well-known schema of the development of the public sphere. As is also well-known, numerous critics have questioned the inclusivity and universalism of this public sphere, pointing out that women in particular were excluded from this space, and that violence in the domestic sphere remained unexamined. However, I argue that the contradictory nature of Enlightenment means that, for all the problematic gendered nature of the eighteenth century public sphere, at least some male thinkers were prepared to open that dialogic space to women and justify the claims to universalism that have often been questioned.

Steele, in The Tatler, devised dialogues between Bickerstaffe and his young niece, Jenny, to entice young women into an educational process aimed at socialising and containing them. Bernard Mandeville works far more subversively in The Virgin Unmask’d (1709), where a maiden aunt, Lucinda, engages in a dialogue with her young niece, Aurelia, in a digressive tour round the nature of men and matrimony. It is interspersed with a tale about a young woman who defies parental authority, marries for passion, and is then abused and exploited abominably—economically, emotionally, and physically. They also embark, significantly, upon a probing debate on the King of France and political tyranny, explicitly equating this with domestic violence.

Mandeville implicitly admits women to the public sphere, by treating them as fully rational subjects entitled to argue on public affairs. Further, the rhetorical effect of the piece, its novelistic arousal of sympathy, serves to engage the reader on the side of women by defending their rights in the intimate sphere of domesticity.
"

This paper considers Fontenelle’s dialogue, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), in Aph... more This paper considers Fontenelle’s dialogue, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), in Aphra Behn’s translation as A Discovery of New Worlds (1688). The translation itself—from a man’s text into a woman’s, from the French into the words of a nation belligerent towards the French—reflects a dialogic universalism that is characteristic of Enlightenment thought. Fontenelle’s text, significantly in dialogue form, explores the consequences of a post-Copernican, secularised universe in which contact with radically alien others becomes possible and is fictionalised therein. This device allows Fontenelle to demonstrate a dialogic philosophy that is universalist towards the non-fictional human world that actually confronts him. This is not without qualifications: like many progressive texts of this period which are often ambivalent about admitting women, non-Europeans, and the lower classes to the general dia-logue of science, the avowed universal humanism becomes compromised in places. I aim to show that, despite these limits, A Discovery of New Worlds, with its witty, flirtatious exchanges between a man and woman of equal intellectual capacity, separated by both sex and class, displays an authentically dialogic encounter that reveals the utopian pole of Enlightenment thought, inviting all of humanity to share in the pleasures of scientific discovery and the commerce of knowledge.

"This paper uncovers dialogism in the linguistic thought of James Harris’s Universal Grammar, Her... more "This paper uncovers dialogism in the linguistic thought of James Harris’s Universal Grammar, Hermes (1751). Cosmopolitan eighteenth-century society with its expanding public sphere was peculiarly dialogic; it is not surprising that the literary genre of the dialogue was popular and employed in various ways to entertain, to propagandise or to explore.

Theories of language in this period took a more intersubjective, social approach - opposing the individualistic linguistics of Hobbes and Locke - and some dramatised the origin of speech via an imagi-nary primordial dialogue. In contrast, Hermes seems on the surface to be resolutely asocial and private. It also seems to be unconcerned with the origins or development of language and to ignore the differences between languages and the poetic or non-cognitive aspects of speech. This is largely the case.

However, almost as an afterthought, Harris’s final chapter discusses the development of particular languages and their different rhetorical powers; in English, he detects a heteroglossia that arose out of the concrete history of Britain’s trade and exploration and of dialogue with other tongues. Thus the dialogic is the motive force behind the history and specificity of language; eighteenth-century dialogism, in turn, rests upon the material existence of a thriving, expanding, commercial economy, presided over by Hermes, god of trade and inventor of language.
"

University of Hertfordshire, 8‒10 April 2021 As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of ... more University of Hertfordshire, 8‒10 April 2021
As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’ and ‘and favour those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject’. Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), talks of ‘the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies’. ‘Horror’ and ‘terror’ are key terms of affect in Gothic criticism; Townsend urges us, however, to move away from this dichotomy. While we are certainly interested in the darker aspects of fairies and the fear they may induce, this conference also welcomes attention to that aspect of Gothic that invokes wonder and enchantment.

‘Some curious disquiet’: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny A symposium for the bicentenary of The Vampyre, 2019

Open Graves, Open Minds presents: ‘Some curious disquiet’: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and it... more Open Graves, Open Minds presents:

‘Some curious disquiet’: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny

A symposium for the bicentenary of The Vampyre
6-7 April 2019, Keats House, Hampstead

John Polidori published his tale The Vampyre in 1819. It is well known that his vampire emerged out of the same storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati in 1816 that gave birth to that other archetype of the Gothic heritage, Frankenstein’s monster. Present at this gathering were Polidori (who was Byron’s physician), Mary Godwin, Frankenstein’s author; Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley, and (crucially) Lord Byron.

Byron’s contribution to the contest was an inconclusive fragment about a mysterious man characterised by ‘a curious disquiet’. Polidori took this fragment and turned it into the tale of the vampire Lord Ruthven, preying on the vulnerable women of society. The Vampyre was something of a sensation and spawned stage versions and imitations that were hugely popular.

Sir Christopher Frayling declares The Vampyre to be ‘the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre’. Polidori gave the creature the form that largely persists through subsequent vampire narratives, transforming it from the animalistic monster of the Slavic peasantry to something that can haunt the drawing rooms of Western society, undetected. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, modelled on Lord Byron via Lady Caroline Lamb’s scandalous Glenarvon (1818), is aristocratic and sexualised and, though something of a blank canvas, even potentially sympathetic, providing a template for the ‘Byronic hero’ that features in Gothic romance down to the paranormal romances of the present day.

This symposium will trace Polidori’s bloodsucking progeny and his heritage of ‘curious disquiet’ in literature and other media. Guest speakers have been invited to share their research into the many variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori’s seminal textual reincarnation of Byronic glamour. The delegates have been selected for their expertise in the Byronic, the Gothic, and the vampiric. The speakers are: Sir Christopher Frayling, Prof. Catherine Spooner, Prof. William Hughes, Dr Stacey Abbott, Dr Sue Chaplin, Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Prof. Nick Groom, Prof. Gina Wisker, Dr Sam George, Dr Bill Hughes, Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, writer Marcus Sedgwick, and OGOM ECRs and doctoral students Dr Kaja Franck, Daisy Butcher, and Dr Jillian Wingfield.

The Symposium is being held at the beautiful Keats House, Hampstead, home of the poet. The event will include a tour of Keats House (who hold a first edition of The Vampyre) and a trip to Highgate Cemetery, home of the Highgate Vampire (a sensation of the 1970s), and where Karl Marx (who made good use of the vampire metaphor) and others lie.

More details here:
http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/polidori-symposium-2019/

Fees:
£70/day waged; £40/day postgraduate and unwaged
Fee includes all the talks, bespoke catering, including lunch and vampyre cup cakes, tour of Keats House and excursion to Highgate Cemetery.

You can book here:
https://store.herts.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/academic/humanities/some-curious-disquiet-polidori-the-byronic-vampire-and-its-progeny

We are very grateful for the cooperation of Keats House and for generous grants towards the Symposium from the British Association for Romantic Studies, the International Gothic Association, and the University of Hertfordshire.

The OGOM Project is known for its imaginative events and symposia, which are often accompanied by... more The OGOM Project is known for its imaginative events and symposia, which are often accompanied by a media frenzy. We were the first to invite vampires into the academy back in 2010. Our most recent endeavour, Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Feral Humans enjoyed extensive coverage globally and saw us congratulated in the THES for our ambitious 3 day programme which included actual wolves, ‘a first for a UK academy’. Our fourth conference will be an exciting collaboration with the Supernatural Cities: Narrated Geographies and Spectral Histories project at the University of Portsmouth. Supernatural Cities will enjoy its third regeneration, having previously convened in Portsmouth and Limerick.

The OGOM Project is known for its imaginative events and symposia, which have often been accompan... more The OGOM Project is known for its imaginative events and symposia, which have often been accompanied by a media frenzy. We were the first to invite vampires into the academy back in 2010. Our most recent endeavour, Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Feral Humans enjoyed extensive coverage globally and saw us congratulated in the THES for our ambitious 3 day programme which included actual wolves, 'a first for a UK academy'. Our fourth conference will be an exciting collaboration with the Supernatural Cities: Narrated Geographies and Spectral Histories project at the University of Portsmouth. Supernatural Cities will enjoy its third regeneration, having previously convened in Portsmouth and Limerick.