Category Archives: Critical thoughts

British Gothic: Penny Dreadful

Posted on 1st June 2016 by Sam George

Critical Survey is edited by Bryan Loughery and Graham Holderness of the University of Hertfordshire. The journal currently has a very interesting special issue out entitled ‘British Gothic: Penny Dreadful’ (Vol 28. Issue 1, 2016). A list of the essays is … Continue reading →

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Stacey Abbott on iZombie

Posted on 31st May 2016 by William the Bloody

The rise of the sympathetic monster has been a unifying theme of OGOM’s research. Of all the monsters to feature in paranormal romance and similar narratives that humanise the undead and the monstrous, the zombie is surely one of the … Continue reading →

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Top Ten Shapeshifters – The Retro Version

Posted on 27th May 2016 by Sam George

In response to The Guardian’s Top Ten Shapeshifters in Fiction (which is very noughties) and Kaja’s lively alternative list, I am posting my own top ten which is a little bit more retro! A shapeshifter is usually understood to be … Continue reading →

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Vampire Politics meets the EU

Posted on 24th May 2016 by firekrank

This article ‘Transylvania joining EU could see one million vampires in UK by 2020’ was published on the satirical news site NewsThump. Adding a Gothic twist to Brexit, it exaggerates fears regarding national identity by suggesting that by remaining in … Continue reading →

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On Twilight, dangerous love, romantic poetry and voyeurism

Posted on 19th May 2016 by firekrank

The following blog post, ‘Love is Dangerous’, appeared on my Facebook news feed. I read it and the post which it is reacting to (which you can read here) with interest. Whilst the original post on ‘What Happens Next: A … Continue reading →

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Why I believe in the story of ‘Old Stinker’ the Hull Werewolf

Posted on 18th May 2016 by Sam George

Sabine Baring-Gould claims that ‘English folklore is singularly barren of werewolf stories , the reason being that wolves had been extirpated from England under the Anglo Saxon kings, and therefore ceased to be the object of dread to the people’ … Continue reading →

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Beauty and the Beast: A modernist transformation by Clarice Lispector

Posted on 16th May 2016 by William the Bloody

‘Beauty and the Beast’ seems to me to be a rather important fairy tale. It’s the architext of paranormal romance, the story whose narrative form and themes lies at the heart of all those romantic encounters between human and other, … Continue reading →

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Maria Tatar

Posted on 14th May 2016 by William the Bloody

Maria Tatar is John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Harvard University and an expert on children’s literature, German literature, and folklore. She is editor of the Norton Classic Fairy Tales. She coedited (with Erika Eichenseer) the … Continue reading →

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YA Fiction and Style

Posted on 14th May 2016 by William the Bloody

Too many YA novels, more so, I suspect, in the very commercial realm of paranormal romance, are let down by their style–even among the most interesting and complex ones. Too often, these fictions are narrated in the first person and … Continue reading →

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Gargoyle Romance and Capture Fantasy

Posted on 13th May 2016 by William the Bloody

The world of paranormal romance is wide and strange and generically multifarious. Human beings engage erotically with almost every monster the psyche has conjured up, even those where consummation seems somewhat impractical–ghosts, mermen, and zombies, for example. Some of the … Continue reading →

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