Promoting and supporting the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language
Monica Germanà is a Reader in Gothic and Contemporary Studies at the University of Westminster.
To anybody familiar with literary theory and psychoanalysis, reading this collection will offer a unique opportunity of experiencing the uncanny first-hand, enacting it as it appears, ghost-like, from each of the pages it haunts. nicky melville’s ‘familiars’, a poem created by extracting all occurrences of the word ‘familiar’ in two translations of Freud’s 1919 essay […]
Madness. Ghosts. Desire. The latest novel by Lesley McDowell ticks all the boxes of a good Gothic novel. And as many a good Gothic novel does, it pays homage to its predecessors. The novel’s title is one of the most poignant lines from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where Frankenstein claims that ‘we are unfashioned creatures, […]
Was it a hallucination? Was it the fever of the brain? Was it the disordered fancy caused by great bodily weakness? How could I tell? Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Open Door’1 Spectral apparitions possess Scottish ballads and folk-tales in large numbers. Colin Manlove has suggested that, akin to Scandinavian lore, the Scottish supernatural shares a close kinship […]