Introduction: Horror in the Classroom (original) (raw)

As studies of horror have increasingly gained scholarly acceptance, more horror texts are finding their way onto curricula in a number of disciplines. These fictions have always invited a powerful response from their readers and audiences, reactions that have generated numerous interpretations and attempts to explain horror's popularity despite, and possibly even because of, horror's supposedly lowly status, a status that used to be uncritically accepted and accorded also to horror's readers and audiences. Since the late 1980s, the assumption that literary and cinematic horror texts are low cultural forms unworthy of serious critical attention has been successfully challenged on a number of fronts. The essays in this book are therefore no longer constrained by the requirement to bring horror into the realm of scholarly concern. Instead, they explore what the study of horror makes possible, conveying fresh insights into both the genre and its audiences. Fear and Learning incorporates diverse thematic, stylistic and methodological perspectives on the pedagogy of horror, presenting practical studies of horror fictions that reveal important intersections between the academy, culture and society. This book is not only for teachers. It is for everybody who is interested in what we can learn from horror.