Join writers Michael Stewart and Claire o’Callaghan for an evening about gothic literature, as part of the Halifax Goth Festival.
Gothic fiction has been with us for hundreds of years. The first work to call itself Gothic was Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto.
The Gothic influenced the Romantic poets and such novels as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Victorian writers like Dram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louise Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the works of the Brontës, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe; but its influence didn’t stop there. In the twentieth century Daphne du Maurier, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and many others took hold of the genre and ran with it.
Today, the Gothic appears across genres and seeps into almost every aspect of contemporary culture.
But how do we define such an influential phenomenon? What are its chief characteristics? And how does it carry on influencing us today? Writers and Gothic experts, Michael Stewart and Claire O’Callaghan will take us on a chilling, haunting and spooky evening talking all things supernatural, demonic, and spellbinding!
Michael Stewart is the author of nine books, including four Gothic influenced novels: King Crow; Café Assassin; Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff; and Black Wood Women. He is also the creator of the Brontë Stones project, four monumental stones situated in the landscape between the birthplace and the parsonage, inscribed with poems by Kate Bush, Carol Ann Duffy, Jeannette Winterson and Jackie Kay. He is the director of the Brontë Writing Centre.
Claire O’Callaghan is the author of Emily Brontë Reappraised, the most up-to-date biography of the enigmatic writer. She has written extensively about Gothic Literature and is an expert on the lives and works of the Brontës and in the writing of the contemporary historical novelist, Sarah Waters. She is the editor-in-chief of Brontë Studies: the foremost academic journal on the lives and works of the Brontë family.
Tickets are £6 . please note this is not included in the overall festival ticket
