Category Archives: Critical thoughts

Wolf Packs and Feral Children

Posted on 28th January 2015 by firekrank

A couple of tweets caught my eye this week. I have the uncanny ability to pick out the word ‘wolf’ from a page of text. Not sure if this is something that should go on my CV but it is … Continue reading →

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Demon Lovers: Embracing the Monster in Paranormal Romance (slideshow)

Posted on 25th January 2015 by William the Bloody
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Bill Hughes, ‘Demon Lovers: Embracing the Monster in Paranormal Romance’

Posted on 25th January 2015 by William the Bloody

This is rather late, I know, but I just wanted to give a brief account of the Halloween 2014 Spectral Visions event at the University of Sunderland, where I was honoured to be invited to give a keynote talk on … Continue reading →

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Suzanne Burdon, ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the birth of modern science’

Posted on 25th January 2015 by William the Bloody

A stimulating discussion of the attitude towards science in Mary Shelley’s Fankenstein: Mary Shelley wrote ‘Frankenstein’ when she was just 18, and it is often read as a gothic horror story and prophetic warning about the dangers of taking science … Continue reading →

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Maria Popova, ‘The Best Illustrations from 150 Years of Alice in Wonderland’

Posted on 24th January 2015 by William the Bloody

There is some astonishing and beautiful artwork here in this account of the illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, many of which I’d not seen before. I hadn’t known Tove Jannson had illustrated the work, and hers are especially lovely.

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Suzie Grogan, ‘From stanza to screen: How a Keats poem is inspiring 21st-century film makers’

Posted on 22nd January 2015 by William the Bloody

An interesting short piece on contemporary film versions of Keats’s Gothic-styled demon lover poem, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci‘: La Belle Dame taps into the current focus on the supernatural in young adult fiction, and offers countless opportunities for interpretation … Continue reading →

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Podcast: A.S. Byatt discusses the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm

Posted on 16th January 2015 by William the Bloody

Novelists A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk venture together into Germany’s dark woods to discover witches, goblins, lost children and treasure.

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William Gray, ‘Go into the woods – at your peril’

Posted on 16th January 2015 by William the Bloody

The Disney film of Stephen Sondheim’s darkly witty musical Into the Woods, with its ingenious interweaving of classic tales from the Grimms, is to be released soon. Here, Professor William Gray of the University of Chichester, Director of the Sussex … Continue reading →

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Rowan Williams: why we need fairy tales now more than ever

Posted on 9th January 2015 by William the Bloody

Rowan Williams reviews Marina Warner’s new book, Jack Zipes’s translation of the Grimms, and Malcolm Lyons’s translation of early Arabic wonder tales, and discusses the power of the fairy tale in a fascinating essay-review.

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Peter and the Wolf : celebrity narration and the enduring appeal of this tale

Posted on 22nd December 2014 by Sam George

Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf has been recorded more often than any other piece of classical music – over 400 times in more than a dozen languages. The narration has been spoken by everyone from David Bowie to Eleanor … Continue reading →

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