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Author's Websites
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- Marcus Sedgwick Author of YA vampire novels My Swordhand is Singing and The Kiss of Death, and many other award-winning novels
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Blogroll
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- Gothic Imagination (University of Stirling) The Gothic Imagination blog at the University of Sterling
- IGA Postgraduate Forum
- Life on Magrs (Paul Magrs)
- Myth & Moor Terry Windling’s blog
- Mythopoeic Society The Mythopoeic Society is a non-profit organization devoted to the study of mythopoeic literature, particularly the works of members of the informal Oxford literary circle known as the “Inklings.”
- Pook Press Book Blog
- Reading the Gothic: UH Reading Group
- Romancing the Gothic All the Gothic, All the Romance, All the Time
- Samantha Shannon Samantha Shannon’s blog
- Seven Miles of Steel Thistles Katherine Langrish’s blog on fairy tales and YA fantasy
- Sheffield Gothic Sheffield Gothic is a collective group of Postgraduate Students in the School of English at The University of Sheffield with a shared interest in all things Gothic.
- Spectral Visions (University of Sunderland)
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- Victoria Schwab Victoria Schwab’s official site
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Journals
- Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies
- American Gothic Studies American Gothic Studies is the official journal of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG), which promotes and advances the study of the American Gothic
- Dark Arts Journal
- Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror
- Echinox Journal Caietele Echinox is a biannual academic journal in world and comparative literature, dedicated to the study of the social, historical, cultural, religious, literary and arts imaginaries
- Fairy Tale Review The website of the Fairy Tale Review journal.
- Fantastika Journal
- Folklore Journal of The Folklore Society. A fully peer-reviewed international journal of folklore and folkloristics, in printed and digital format
- Gothic Nature Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the Ecogothic
- Gothic Studies The official journal of the International Gothic Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day.
- Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction
- International Journal of Young Adult Literature an academic peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing original and serious scholarship on young adult literature from all parts of the world.
- Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (ISSN 2009-0374) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, electronic publication dedicated to the study of Gothic and horror literature, film, new media and television.
- Journal of Popular Romance Studies The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is a double-blind peer reviewed interdisciplinary journal exploring popular romance fiction and the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture.
- Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts An interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of the fantastic in Literature, Art, Drama, Film, and Popular Media
- Lewis Carroll Review The Reviewing Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society
- Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research Mapping the Impossible is an open-access student journal publishing peer-reviewed early-career research into fantasy and the fantastic.
- Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies The journal publishes scholarly work dealing with the fairy tale in any of its diverse manifestations and contexts
- Monsters and the Monstrous Monsters and the Monstrous is a biannual peer reviewed global journal that serves to explore the broad concept of “The Monster” and “The Monstrous” from a multifaceted inter-disciplinary perspective.
- Otranto.co.uk: The New Strawberry Hill Press Otranto.co.uk: The New Strawberry Hill Press
- Pennywise Dreadful: The Journal of Stephen King Studies Journal of Stephen King Studies
- Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural Preternature provides an interdisciplinary, inclusive forum for the study of topics that stand in the liminal space between the known world and the inexplicable.
- Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural
- Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association
- Studies in Gothic Fiction
- Studies in the Fantastic Studies in the Fantastic is a journal devoted to the Speculative, Fantastic, and Weird in literature and other arts
- Supernatural Studies Supernatural Studies is a peer-reviewed journal that promotes rigorous yet accessible scholarship in the growing field of representations of the supernatural, the speculative, the uncanny, and the weird.
- The Lion and the Unicorn The Lion and the Unicorn, an international theme- and genre-centered journal, is committed to a serious, ongoing discussion of literature for children.
- Thinking Horror: a journal of horror philosophy
- Victorian Popular Fictions Journal Victorian Popular Fictions is the journal of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association. The VPFA is a forum for the dissemination and discussion of new research into nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular narrativeo
Related Links
- Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index The Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index is a classification numeric system created to group similar folktales from different cultures
- ACADEmy LSAD centre for research into Art, Curatorial Studies, Applied Design and Art and Design Education
- African Religions With the Yoruba Religion Reader and similar resources
- Angela Carter Society Promoting the study and appreciation of the life and work of Angela Carter
- Art Passions Art Passions: Fairy Tales are the Myths We Live By
- Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature
- Black Romance Timeline History of Black authors of romantic fiction
- British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) The UK’s leading national organisation for promoting the study of Romanticism and the history and culture of the period from which it emerged.
- British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) The British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) is a multidisciplinary organisation dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge about the Victorian period.
- Byron Society The Byron Society celebrates the life and works of Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), a poet, traveller and revolutionary
- Centre for Contemporary Legend
- Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic
- Centre for Folklore Myth Magic A home and meeting point for Folklore and Storytelling in the North
- Centre for Myth Studies, University of Essex The Centre It promotes the study of myth, from ancient to modern, and raises awareness of the importance of myth within the contemporary world.
- Centre for the History of the Gothic (University of Sheffield)
- Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction
- Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
- Fairy Investigation Society, The a website that will gather together sources, links, bibliographical references and discussions on fairies and related supernatural creatures
- Fairyist: The Fairy Investigation Society Website and blog for the Fairy Investigation Society
- Fantastic Fiction Bibliographies for fantastic fiction
- Fantasy Literature Fantasy and Science Fiction book reviews
- Folk Horror Revival Folk Horror Revival is a gathering place to share and discuss Folk Horror in film, TV, books, art, music, events and other media.
- Folklore and Mythology – Electronic Texts
- Folklore Society The Folklore Society (FLS) is a learned society, based in London, devoted to the study of all aspects of folklore and tradition, including: ballads, folktales, fairy tales, myths, legends, traditional song and dance, folk plays, games, seasonal events, ca
- Folklore Thursday
- Ghoul Guides Home to the Ghoul Guides – a digital multimedia project devoted to exploring, understanding, and enjoying the wonders and weirdness of the Gothic
- Gothic Charm School An essential guide for Goths and those who love them
- Gothic Feminism Gothic Feminism is a research project based at the University of Kent which seeks to re-engage with theories of the Gothic and reflect specifically upon the depiction of the Gothic heroine in film
- Gothic Women Project 2023: The Year of Gothic Women. An interdisciplinary project devoted to spotlighting undervalued and understudied women writers
- Gothica: University of Birmingham
- Gothicise Gothicise Fine Art Collective
- Hans Christian Andersen Centre
- Haunted Shores Haunted Shores Research Network, dedicated to investigating coasts and littoral space in Gothic, horror, and fantastic multimedia
- IAFA: The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts The purpose of IAFA is to promote and recognize achievement in the study of the fantastic
- International Fairy-Tale Filmography Searchable database of fairy tale film adaptations
- International Gothic Association
- Mabinogion Pathfinder Many links to resources for the medieval Welsh collection of romances, The Mabinogion
- Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MMU)
- MEARCSTAPA monsters: the experimental association for the research of cryptozoology through scholarly theory and practical application
- Mermaids of the British Isles a history of mermaids in the arts and cultural imagination of our early islands, which will map the place of these beguiling, and often deadly, figures in the national maritime imaginary, and explore our ancestors’ persistent reimagining of the mermaid
- My So-called Undeath: My Life as a Zombie (Daniel Waters) The fictional blog of Tommy from Daniel Water’s Generation Dad series
- Mythological Africans Exploring African mythologies, spiritualities and cultures
- Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook Content for a course in Myth & Folklore taught at the University of Oklahoma
- Open Folklore Open Folklore is devoted to increasing the number of useful resources, published and unpublished, available in open access form for folklore studies and the communities with which folklorists partner
- PCA Vampire Studies A site dedicated to the Vampire Studies Area of the Pop Culture Association
- Pook Press Publisher of Vintage Illustrated Fairy Tales, Folk Tales and Children’s Classics
- Romance Scholarship DB Very full bibliography of secondary reading on romantic fiction
- RomanceWiki A wiki resource for romance fiction authors, texts, and publishers
- Romancing the Gothic All the Gothic, All the Romance, All the Time
- Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database is a freely available online resource designed to help students and researchers locate secondary sources for the study of the science fiction and fantasy and associated genres.
- Shapeshifters in Popular Culture
- Sophie Lancaster Foundation The charity, known as The Sophie Lancaster Foundation, will focus on creating respect for and understanding of subcultures in our communities.
- Speculative Fiction in Translation
- Spine-chillers and suspense: A timeline of Gothic fiction
- Supernatural Cities Supernatural Cities is an interdisciplinary network of humanities and social science scholars of urban environments and the supernatural.
- Supernatural Studies Association The Supernatural Studies Association is an organization dedicated to the academic study of representations of the supernatural, the speculative, the uncanny, and the weird across periods and disciplines.
- The Secret Commonwealth
- The Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG) The Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG) was established in 2023 to promote and advance the study of the American Gothic through research, teaching, and publication
- The Thinker's Garden we also love Plotinus and the Renaissance Platonists, as well as the Transcendentalists and Romantics. We are also drawn to the peculiarities of the Theosophists and hermeticists of the nineteenth century
- TheoFantastique
- UK Wolf Conservation Trust
- Vamped Vamped is a general interest non-fiction vampire site. We publish interviews, investigations, lists, opinions, reviews and articles on various topics.
- Vampire Studies Association TThe Vampire Studies Association (VSA) was founded by Anthony Hogg . . .“to establish vampire studies as a multidisciplinary field by promoting, disseminating and publishing contributions to vampire scholarship
- Victorian Popular Fiction Association The Association is committed to the revival of interest in understudied popular writers, literary genres and other cultural forms.
- Wells at the World's End I am reading through the complete works of H G Wells, in chronological order. This blog is for my jottings, as I go along.
- Whedon Studies Association
- YA Literature, Media, and Culture YALMC is a resource for those of us researching, writing, writing about, interested in Young Adult Literature, Media, and Culture.
- YA Studies Association (YASA) The YA Studies Association (YASA) is an international organisation existing to increase the knowledge of, and research on, YA literature, media, and related fields
Marcus Sedgwick (1968-2022)
We are very saddened to hear of the death of August Sedgwick, who wrote as Marcus Sedgwick, on 15 November.
August was a brilliant writer who wrote novels for children, young adults, and adults (though he wasn’t fond of the ‘YA’ classification and, like many novels with YA protagonists, his intelligent and deeply engaging books have value for readers beyond this group). His fictions are frequently historical narratives, often tinged with the fantastic or Gothic. I would single out as personal favourites White Crow (2010) and Midwinterblood (2011), but they are all marvellous. August was nominated for and awarded many prestigious literary prizes. He also wrote a dystopian graphic novel (Dark Satanic Mills (2013), with his brother Julian), a picture book, illustrated a folklore collection, reviewed books for the Guardian, published guides on coping with chronic illness, and wrote literary essays (of which more below).
August had collaborated with OGOM from our very first conference, Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture, in 2010 where he gave a fascinating plenary talk on his adaptation of the folkloric vampire in his novels My Swordhand is Singing (2006) and The Kiss of Death (2008). We then invited him to our Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium in 2012 where he was in conversation with Kevin Jackson. He returned as a similarly engaging keynote speaker at further conferences and symposia: ‘The Company of Wolves’: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives—Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans (2015); ‘Some curious disquiet’: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny (2019); The Black Vampyre and Other Creations: Gothic Visions of New World (2020); Nosferatu at 100: The Vampire as Contagion and Monstrous Outsiders (2022). He wrote a special vampire story for the participants of the Polidori event. He also contributed incisive essays to three of our books: ‘The elusive vampire: folklore and fiction – writing My Swordhand is Singing’, in Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2013); ‘Wolves and lies: a writer’s perspective’, in In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Wild Children (2020); and ‘Sexual contagions: Vampirism and tuberculosis; or, “I should like to die of a consumption”’, in The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (2023). He generously spared time to talk to Sam’s students on several occasions. One of his finest books, Midwinterblood (2011), was, August told us, inspired in part by his collaboration with OGOM on vampire research:
working with OGOM and the team around Dr Sam George has encouraged me to voyage more deeply into the relationship between folklore and fiction, and I can see the result in all my work. It has been consistently inspired, enriched and informed by it . . . I strongly see a connection between this work with OGOM and a book I wrote some time later, Midwinterblood, perhaps the book for which I am best known. The Monsters We Deserve was very influenced by our discussions and my thinking about gothic monsters. One of the central questions . . . was inspired by OGOM!!.
(Midwinterblood won the Michael L. Printz Award, America’s most prestigious prize for writing for Young Adults).
We came to know August as a good friend. He was intelligent, erudite, and engrossing in conversation, and a sensitive and amusing companion. His generosity to other writers is well testified to on social media. A lovely man. His passing is a terrible loss.
(Sam will be posting a fuller tribute with her own personal reflections later.)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/01/marcus-sedgwick-obituary
Posted in News
Tagged Fantasy, Gothic, historical fiction, Marcus Sedgwick, obituary, vampire books, YA Fiction, YA Gothic
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Breaking Through to Faery
Thank you to everyone who attended our Breaking Through to Faery: Re-enchantment and the Gothic Folklore of Fungi event on 19th November. We had 177 bookings and the event sold out after just a few days of the tickets being released! There were some accompanying posts on Twitter in the build up to the day including threads on Mushrooms in Fiction and Mushrooms in Film and Seeing Fairies. We launched a new hashtag #GothicFungi #BeingHuman2022 and a full Breaking Through to Faery Twitter ‘Moment’ after the event.
We conceived ‘Breaking Through to Faery’ to create a sense of wonder in the everyday and to re-enchant the local landscape after the confines of lockdown and the pandemic. It was developed around the themes of folklore, fungi, enchantment and the Gothic and it celebrated a unique collaboration between the Open Graves, Open Minds research group (OGOM) at the University of Hertfordshire and the newly launched Centre for Folklore, Myth and Magic in Todmorden, West Yorkshire.
Todmorden is an ex-mill town in Yorkshire; it is a place of folklore and natural beauty. It is hoped that our attendees were inspired by their journey into the botanical gothic and that they will discover more about the natural environment and its folklore. We would like our theme of re-enchantment to combat the sense of ennui many people feel as a result of the pandemic. We hope to foster creativity, generate excitement, and reawaken a sense of awe and wonder about life in regions such the Calder Valley, celebrating its folkloric landscapes and gothic possibilities.
This is the moment when I found fairyland hidden in a rotten tree stump; it really exemplifies the sense of enchantment about the natural world that we wanted to capture!
The event was funded by the Being Human Festival. Being Human is the UK’s only national festival of the humanities. A celebration of humanities research through public engagement, it is led by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the UK’s national centre for the pursuit, support and promotion of research in the humanities. The festival works in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy to support humanities public engagement across the UK.
The theme of this year’s festival was ‘Breakthroughs’. We interpreted this as existing at the intersection of folklore and the Gothic. Fungal networks beneath the ground can break through into the seen world as magical fairy rings; we saw our event as similarly enchanting and transforming, connecting our research to the communities around it.
Attendees took part in a range of activities and were introduced to a new concept of botanical gothic:
Family Craft Activity: ‘Build a Mushroom Forest in Papier Mache’
With lead-in activity involving children from Shade Primary School, led by Holly Elsdon, exploring storytelling on the theme of fungi and enchantment and introducing the idea of foraging
Gothic Flash Fiction Writing
40-50 words on the theme of breakthroughs, or fungi, fairy enchantment and the Gothic. Led by Sam George and Bill Hughes from OGOM Project (to be published on the OGOM blog).
Here are some sample entries:
Silently, covertly, we spring up in the gloom to share our secret commonwealth. Nobody sees us or understands us, except the fairies, fauns and elves, and those uncanny ones clandestinely hovering betwixt humans and angels.
Arcane messages surge along the silver mycelial fibres underground. Above, we are surrounded by these alien consumers of the dead, this Faery Circle, like fungal dolmens. We should never have strayed inside. Yet now we break through to enchanted communion with another world, beyond the living.
Fungi Identification Activity
With Roze from Thyme for Tiffin.
Tea and Fungi-Themed Cakes
Made by Thyme for Tiffin from locally sourced fungi and flowers.
Exhibition: Photographing Fungi
By Holly Elsdon (with words by Clare Slack).
Illustrated Talk: Journeying into the Botanical Gothic
With Sam George, Convenor of the OGOM Project
There were some fantastic mushroom-inspired crafts and displays throughout the centre on the day too. It was a real fungi feast for the eyes! The fungi exhibition is still open so do visit it and you can pop into the Centre and see all the wonderful toadstool-inspired creations too.
If you attended, we do hope you enjoyed it. We will be gathering our feedback shortly and we’re looking forward to getting your responses. Thank you to everyone who took part. Special thanks go to Holly Elsdon at the Centre for Folklore, Myth and Magic for her energy and creativity and to Dr Bill Hughes of OGOM for his work on the admin and his warm support on the day. Gothtastic!
Posted in Events
Tagged botany, crafts, enchantment, fairies, Folklore, fungi, Gothic
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Gramarye ‘Ill met by moonlight’ special issue
The ‘Ill met by moonlight’ special issue of Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, guest edited by Sam and I, is now available to preorder here.
This special issue has emerged out of our very successful international online conference which we held 8-11 April 2011: ‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realm in literature and culture. The essays cover a range of topics concerning Gothic Faerie, plus flash fiction on the conference theme from our competition and book reviews. It’s a sumptuously produced publication and we hope you’ll enjoy it! You can see the Table of Contents here.
Many thanks to all the contributors and to Heather Robbins and Paul Quinn at Gramarye. We’ve really enjoyed collaborating with the Chichester Centre, whose research interests overlap with those of OGOM, and we look forward to future cooperation. We are also aiming at compiling another special journal issue and an edited collection in book form of further research from the conference in 2023.
Posted in OGOM News, OGOM: Ill met by moonlight, Publications
Tagged enchantment, Faerie, fairies, Gothic, journal
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OGOM Hallowe’en 2022
OGOM are involved in some very exciting and spooky events this Hallowe’en. We will be distributing our stylish new OGOM postcards as informative souvenirs of the events and our Project.
Blood and Celluloid Vampire Film Festival
First, on 15 October, Sam and I were invited to introduce the Blood and Celluloid Vampire Film Festival at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford (part of the BFI’s national In Dreams are Monsters programme–it’s worth checking out the rest of this). This is a beautiful independent cinema, run by Tom Jowett and his team, and we were made very welcome and had a great time, with five of the best vampire films being shown.
Werewolves and the Gothic
22 October: Sam will be talking on ‘Werewolves and the Gothic: In Search of the Spectre Wolf’ at 1.30 on 22nd October at Brompton Cemetery, London. Tickets are still available and the event includes gin cocktails in a fabulously Gothic cemetery setting! This is part of the London Month of the Dead Festival.
Beauty into Beast film festival
13 November–4 December: Again as part of the BFI’s In Dreams are Monsters season, Dr Kaja Franck will be involved in the Beauty into Beast: Women, Werewolves and Wild Shapeshifters season at the Electric Cinema, Birmingham. Kaja will be introducing the fabulous The Company of Wolves; the event begins 17 November at 19.45.
Recovering the Vampire conference
4-5 November: Sam and I are participating in the online conference Recovering the Vampire: Degeneration to Regeneration, organised by Dr Madeline Potter and Dr Laura Eastlake for Edge Hill University. Sam’s paper is ‘Folkloric vampire at the crossroads: Superstition, recovery, and redemption’ and my paper is ‘Regenerating genre and society through YA Gothic dystopia in Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown’. This is free to attend (though a donation to assist early career scholars is welcomed); Registration will remain open until 24 October.
Breaking Through to Faery
19 November: Sam is collaborating in an event with Holly Elsdon of the Todmorden Centre for Folklore, Myth, and Magic. This OGOM event, Breaking Through to Faery: Re-enchantment and the Gothic Folklore of Fungi, is part of the nationwide Being Human Festival and we’re very grateful for receiving funding from them. Tickets are unfortunately now fully booked.
Posted in Events, OGOM News
Tagged Faery, fairies, Film, Folklore, fungi, Gothic, horror, The Company of Wolves, Vampires, Werewolves, women
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The Little Mermaid and exclusion
OGOM and the appeal of the mermaid
Mermaids (and other fabulous marine creatures such as sirens and selkies) have long been favourite topics with us at OGOM. Three’s something appealing about their ambiguous positioning between human and animal, aquatic and land-dwelling. We’ve posted articles on the blog before (just search for ‘mermaids’ etc.).
Sam has had a particular interest in the Japanese yokai ‘mermaid’, Amabie, as her conference paper and journal article discussed here illustrate. Here’s the actual article, ‘Amabie goes viral: the monstrous mercreature returns to battle the Gothic Covid-19′, Critical Quarterly, 4 (December 2020), 32-40.
I’ve also been doing research into literary manifestations of the mermaid, particularly reworkings of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ in YA fantasy. I’ll post the fruits of this research on here at some point. In the meantime, these past posts point to various resources on the mermaid figure: ‘Mermaids: ballads, novels, films‘ and ”Merpeople and Monstrous Lovers‘. There’s also the beginnings of a Bibliography here; we’re working on making this much more comprehensive and having at as a resource page in the same way we’ve done vampires.
In the meantime, here’s an excellent article from The Conversation by Michelle Smith (Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University) on the current controversy over the depiction of the mermaid in Disney’s new film, The Little Mermaid:
The Little Mermaid has always been a story about exclusion – and its author was an outsider
Michelle Smith, Monash University
Disney’s forthcoming live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid has sparked an astonishing backlash. The trailer for the 2023 film was met with millions of dislikes on YouTube, seemingly because the mermaid is played by Halle Bailey, a Black actress.
The 1989 animated Disney film, on which the upcoming film is based, featured a red-headed mermaid named Ariel (and a singing crab with a Jamaican accent). The implication of much of the recent criticism is that a Black mermaid is not “authentic” to The Little Mermaid fairy tale.
But fairy tales are continually retold in new ways over time.
Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairy tale is radically different to the 1989 film. He was a bisexual social outsider who struggled to express his desires. And his The Little Mermaid was not the happily-ever-after romance Disney fans are familiar with, but a tale of torturous unrequited love – which he worked on while a man he was infatuated with was getting married. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qp4yfmOOv6Q?wmode=transparent&start=0 Black girls react joyfully to The Little Mermaid trailer.
The first Cinderella was Chinese
Outrage over fairy tales crossing cultural and racial boundaries is misguided. Variations of most popular tales are found in multiple cultures, and familiar tale types have a history of circling the globe. The way they’re told has adapted, too: from being shared orally, to literary versions (from the 17th century), and now film, television and games (from the 20th century).
Indeed, the very reason fairy tales have endured is because they are continually retold in new ways, to suit changing audiences and cultural norms.
The first recorded Cinderella variant, for example, is Yeh-Hsien, from China. It was first published around 850; while Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, which influenced most adaptations we know today, was published in 1697. Yeh-Hsien does not have the aid of a fairy godmother; instead, she wishes on the bones of a fish. If fairy tales should only “belong” to the first culture in which they were ever told or written, then it would be logical to suggest we should only depict Cinderella as Chinese. https://www.youtube.com/embed/xpacm4ET-Cs?wmode=transparent&start=0 The story of Yeh-Hsien is the first recorded variant of Cinderella.
Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid
Disney’s animated adaptations, beginning with Snow White in 1937, have come to define our cultural understanding of fairy tales. It’s one reason why we’ve lost our cultural awareness of the diverse origins and traditions surrounding these tales. And these films, aimed at a family audience, sanitise earlier fairy tale variants – which were often more gruesome and disturbing than their Disney adaptations. https://www.youtube.com/embed/GC_mV1IpjWA?wmode=transparent&start=0 The story of Disney’s Little Mermaid, Ariel, is very different from Hans Christian Andersen’s original.
Unlike the Disney films, Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is a tragic story of suffering and extreme sacrifice. P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, wrote about her dislike of the mermaid’s protracted agony and found Andersen’s “tortures, disguised as piety” to be “demoralizing”.
Many of Andersen’s protagonists are small and delicate figures who arouse our sympathy. This frailty can be due to being poor and uncared for, as in The Little Match Girl. Or it can result from characters who are unable to move without difficulty. The tiny Thumbelina must be carried from one location to another. And the Little Mermaid walks with the sensation of metal blades piercing her feet with every step.
The Little Mermaid is also a prime example of Andersen’s focus on female sacrifice and suffering. For a start, she has her tongue cut out by the sea witch and is made mute. And she maintains her delicate femininity with her “lovely, floating” walk on her hard-won human legs, despite the severe pain that is the cost of her bargain.
The mermaid saves the Prince on two occasions. First, she risks her life to rescue him from a shipwreck. Andersen’s fairy tale is not a love story, however, because the Prince never romantically desires the mermaid. He is impressed by her devotion but treats the mermaid like an animal or a child. He even gives her “permission to sleep on a velvet cushion at his door”.
The ultimate self-sacrifice of the Little Mermaid is evident when the Prince marries another woman and the mermaid holds the train of her wedding dress, while thinking only “of her death and of all she had lost in this world”.
The sea witch had promised that if the mermaid could make the prince fall in love with her, she would gain an immortal soul. If not, she would die of a broken heart on the first day after his marriage to someone else – and become sea foam on the waves. When she is faced with the choice to kill the Prince and rejoin her family in her mermaid form, she sacrifices her own life instead.
Andersen as outsider
Andersen’s sad personal life unavoidably influences how his stories of downtrodden and pitiful characters are interpreted. In the case of the Little Mermaid, there is a close connection between the writing of the story and Andersen’s own feelings of isolation and rejection.
Andersen was a social outsider who never married – and potentially never had sex. He did become infatuated with both men and women and is therefore understood as bisexual. Yet he struggled to express his desires, an issue related to a series of complex psychological problems.
One of the men Andersen loved was his friend Edvard Collin, who did not return Andersen’s feelings. Biographer Jackie Wullschläger notes that The Little Mermaid was written “at the height of Andersen’s obsession with and renunciation of Edvard Collin”. When Collin’s marriage to a woman was held in August of 1836, Andersen intentionally remained on the Danish island of Funen in order to avoid the wedding. There, he continued to work on The Little Mermaid.
It is possible to view the Little Mermaid failing to gain an eternal soul through marriage to the Prince as Andersen rejecting the idea that immortality must depend on love being reciprocated. As Wullschläger suggests, Andersen likely equated himself, a bisexual, with the mermaid’s understanding of herself as a different species to humans.
Andersen wrote that he deliberately avoided the convention found in other mermaid fiction, such as Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1811), in which human love enables the acquisition of a soul:
I’m sure that’s wrong! […] I won’t accept that sort of thing in this world. I have permitted my mermaid to follow a more natural, more divine path.
Andersen’s tales frequently promote his Christian religious ethics. The path to salvation with God that Andersen maps often entails a cheerful embrace of pain, suffering, or humiliation. Maria Tatar comments that Andersen’s protagonists embrace death “joyfully”. They “reproach themselves for their sins and endorse piety, humility, passivity, and a host of other ‘virtues’ designed to promote subservient behaviour”.
Most of Andersen’s protagonists are female. Fairy tales in the 19th century, such as those of the Brothers Grimm, commonly sought to direct the behaviour and morality of girls. In the case of the Little Mermaid, her harsh treatment and ultimate fate can be understood as punishment for her sexual curiosity in pursuing the Prince. It’s also a caution against attempting to leave the undersea home where she belongs.
The conclusion of Andersen’s tale transforms the Little Mermaid into sea foam and then a “daughter of the air” who may gain a soul after 300 years of compassionate, self-sacrificial behaviour. The moral educational function of fairy tales is especially evident in this ending. Child readers are informed their own good acts will shorten the length of time the Little Mermaid (and the other daughters of the air) must wait by one year, while bad acts will lengthen their wait.
Diversifying and adapting fairy tales
Disney’s original, animated The Little Mermaid departs radically from Hans Christian Andersen’s published fairy tale. Some of these changes reflect developments in ideas about the purpose of stories of children. Young characters undergoing extreme self-sacrifice and unhappy endings now rarely appear in stories for children.
Disney’s transformation of a story of salvation and religious devotion into a straightforward romance is but one example of how fairy tales lend themselves to retelling in new contexts. The live-action adaptation starring Halle Bailey, which seeks to make children of colour feel represented in fairy tales, is one more iteration of the story.
This attempt to diversify fairy-tale adaptations builds on the queer history of The Little Mermaid. The story is already understood as having parallels with Andersen’s bisexuality – and the experience of transgender people. The most important UK organisation for supporting transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse young people, for example, is called Mermaids.
It’s unsurprising that outsiders of all kinds connect with a story about a mermaid who cannot fit in the human world she desperately wishes to belong to. Whether that’s a beloved author in 19th-century Denmark, or an African American girl today.
Michelle Smith, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Mythological Africans: Seeing Beyond the Unknown Other in Folklore
We’d like to showcase the work of Helen Nde, whose project Mythological Africans is an exciting exploration of the diverse mythology, religion, and folklore of the African continent.
Helen has a forthcoming book, The Runaway Princess and Other Stories, a collection of short stories recounting the deeds and misdeeds of memorable women from African history, legend, and folklore. You can support the Kickstarter project for the book here. There is an extract from the book here.
Helen describes the book here:
Seeing beyond the unknown other in folklore
Whether they are fueling our fever dreams or feeding our fantasies, otherworldly creatures have one thing in common: they are often our best approximations of the unknown other. In recent times, however, changelings, zombies, blood suckers, shapeshifters and other things that normally go bump in the night have enjoyed pop culture revivals which do not always cast them as the feared and fearful unknown. This revival is evident too in works of fantasy, magical realism, or speculative fiction by African authors. Ogbanjes and abikus, children born to die and return over and over again, are not exclusively harbingers of woe. Revenants fall in love, shapeshifters save the day and monsters speak necessary truths. This literary landscape also promotes efforts empower the marginalized and challenge negative stereotypes previously informed by ignorance.
On the African continent, one of such marginalized groups include the various short statured indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples who live in the dense forests of countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Madagascar, and Zambia. Encounters between these and other African peoples in the course of the Bantu expansions and other migrations have created a rich body of folklore which, in some stories, cast these forest peoples as magical beings endowed with deep knowledge of the natural world. In other stories, they are tricky and violent cannibals to be avoided at all costs at best or destroyed at worst. These stories most likely reflect the nature of the encounters: friendly or hostile. Migrating populations were, after all, encroaching on and building settlements in territories previously occupied by various hunter-gatherer populations. These stereotypes have persisted to the present day, with forest peoples across the continent simultaneously admired for their close connection to the forests and the knowledge that has yielded over time, but also systematically dehumanized and dispossessed of the same forests which have been their homes for millennia.
It is therefore important as we continue to plumb the folklore of different African peoples for creative inspiration, to recognize when a creature depicted as dangerous or monstrous is in reality a differently abled or bodied person. This is a theme I explore in this excerpt from my upcoming book The Runaway Princess and Other Stories in which I retell traditional African folktales recounting the deeds and misdeeds of memorable girls and women from African history, legend, and folklore. I hope you enjoy it!
Posted in Books and Articles, Resources
Tagged Africa, African folklore, African literature, Fantasy, foklore, magical realism, Monsters, myth, speculative fiction
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Blood & Celluloid: Vampire Film Festival – October 15th 2022
Fangtastic news – OGOM will be taking part in Blood and Celluloid: an all day Vampire Film Festival at The Ultimate Picture Palace, Cowley Road, Oxford. This is part of the BFI In Dreams are Monsters Season – a major BFI UK-wide film and events season celebrating the horror genre on screen, taking place from 1 October to 31 December in cinemas nationwide, and at BFI Southbank (from 17 October to 31 December).
Films showing throughout the day (11.00-22.00) include:
- Neil Jordan’s atmospheric adaptation of Anne Rice’s mould-breaking novel Interview With The Vampire, introduced by Dr Sam George and Dr Bill Hughes from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project (University of Hertfordshire).
- Prolific French horror director Jean Rollin’s elegantly crafted erotic tale of female vampirism, Fascination, introduced by Professor Patricia MacCormack (Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge).
- Tony Scott’s stylish cult classic The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as chic vampire lovers, introduced by film critic and film programmer Dr Anton Bitel (University of Oxford).
- Abel Ferrara’s gloriously gloomy yet gorgeously shot look at urban decay and human fallibility The Addiction, starring Lili Taylor and Christopher Walken.
- And closing the festival will be Jim Jarmusch’s stylish and atmospheric modern masterpiece Only Lovers Left Alive, starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as two vampire lovers coming to grips with humanity’s decline.
Why Vampires, Why Film?
Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth century in Dracula, vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture. Stalking dreams and nightmares in print and on screen, they have enacted a host of anxieties and desires, shifting shape as the culture they are brought to life in itself changes form. They have fascinated us down the years in all their various manifestations and cultural forms, but it is film that has reinvented and reanimated them, giving sustenance to our most beloved gothic monster.
Taking Part
The Open Graves, Open Minds project is beyond excited to be taking part in this vampire film festival. Every age has the vampire it needs and 2022 is the year of the vampire! It marks 125 years of Dracula, 150 years of the first lesbian vampire Carmilla, 100 years of the monstrous celluloid vampire Nosferatu, and 25 years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s also 30 years since Bram Stoker’s Dracula, dir. by Frances Ford Coppola, so there couldn’t be a more perfect time for us to celebrate the vampire’s reanimation, and its everlasting love affair with the cinema (following on from our Nosferatu at 100 event earlier in the year)
Booking
Booking and Preview here. Festival passes (limited to 50) are now on sale and cost £30 (with a Pay Less option of £25 and a Pay More option of £35). Tickets to individual screenings are also on sale for the price of £9 each.
Posted in Events, OGOM News
Tagged Film, horror, Monsters, Neil Jordan, vampire lovers, Vampires
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Werewolves and the Gothic: In Search of the Spectre Wolf (22nd October 2022 – London Month of the Dead)
London Month of the Dead is an annual festival of death and the arts supporting London’s magnificent seven cemeteries: Kensal Green (1832); West Norwood (1837); Highgate (1839); Abney Park (1840); Nunhead (1840); Brompton (1840); Tower Hamlets (1841). The programme this year is outstanding, full of gothic tours and spooky entertainments You can check out all the events for October 2022 here.
Tickets are selling out fast and I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking on British werewolves at this year’s festival: ‘Werewolves and the Gothic: In Search of the Spectre Wolf’ is at 1.30 on 22nd October at Brompton Cemetery.
woo hoo – here’s a synopsis:
British werewolves differ from their European counterparts in that they are rooted within haunted landscapes, often appearing as wolf phantoms. In fact, British folklore is unique in representing a history of werewolf sightings in places in Britain where there were once wolves. In this talk, I draw on theories of the weird and the eerie to inform my analysis of werewolves in contemporary myth. I depart from psychoanalytic studies which tie the werewolf to the ‘beast within’ and posit a theory that roots werewolves in landscape and absence in the present. The result is a UK landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present (a spectred, rather than ‘a scepter’d Isle’). Interrogating the werewolf as spectre wolf, brings the creature within the realms of the weird and the eerie and situates it firmly within gothic modes. This is the climate in which the spectre of the UK werewolf has re-emerged (rising from the ashes of the flesh and blood wolf).
BOOKING Tickets £12 including a delightful gin cocktail and a 20% donation to Brompton Cemetery. I’d love to see you there and the venue is stunning!!
For those who don’t know me here is a brief biography:
Sam George is Associate Professor in Research at the University of Hertfordshire and the convenor of the popular Open Graves, Open Minds Project. Known as the ‘coffin boffin’ on social media, her research specialisms include werewolves, wolves and wild children and the history of the literary vampire. Her interviews have appeared in newspapers from The Guardian and The Independent to the Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Post, and the Wall Street Journal. She’s a regular contributor to The Conversation, amassing 176,364 reads for her articles on vampires and werewolves alone. She recently appeared on Radio 4s ‘In Our Time’ speaking on the first fictional vampire.
Her work with OGOM has led to a number of co-edited publications with Dr Bill Hughes: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2012); In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children (2020); The Legacy of John William Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (2023) and the forthcoming collection ‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Faerie Realm in Literature and Culture. Sam also co-edited with Bill the first ever issue of Gothic Studies on ‘Vampires’ in 2013 and ‘Werewolves’ in 2019
Posted in Events, OGOM Research
Tagged Brompton cemetery, London Month of the Dead, Sam George, Werewolves, Wolves
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